Edited by David Shields and Bradford Morrow
W. W. Norton ($17.95)

by Scott F. Parker

One of the defining questions of the 20th century was, as David Shields and Bradford Morrow write in their introduction to this new anthology, “if there is no transcendental meaning, and we know we are mortal, how do we construct a life with value?” If The Inevitable is any indication, this question continues to shape the intellectual and moral situation at the start of this century. In our post-Nietzschean world, human life comes burdened with the need to account for itself—a necessity made urgent by the looming and “inevitable” promise of death.

Shields and Morrow, addressing this challenge head-on, have gathered together twenty contemporary writers and set them loose on the subject of mortality. The book, as they write in their introduction, is an “attempt to look at death from distinctly different points of view, by writers who see death as a brute biological fact that does not necessarily guarantee some passageway to eternal peace or punishment. And while this gathering may center on death, it is ultimately about the existential fact of our ineffable selves, our mortal bodies, death’s fragile ‘other half’: life itself.”

Compiling essays that don’t hold up religion as an absolution of the problems of life, Shields and Morrow invite readers to face those problems directly. There is nowhere for the reader to hide in Sallie Tisdale’s excruciatingly detailed meditation on flies. Neither is it possible in a review to convey how profound are these words when they follow that meditation: “When I begin to accept that its very fragility and perishing nature is the beauty in life, then I begin to find safety inside a burning house. I don’t need to escape if I know how to live inside it.” There might be religion in this book, but it’s a religion of this world.

Though distinct in style, and in the kind of solace it offers, The Inevitable is quite similar to Shields’s earlier book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), in which he arranges a collage of medical facts, reflections on death, details about his own failing body, and observations about his dad’s seemingly indestructible one. One of the things that made that book a winning tragedy is that while his ninety-plus-year-old father seems indestructible, the reader can’t escape the knowledge that he isn’t. And the implication/reminder follows immediately: neither is the reader. So the solace comes not from escaping the specter of death for the length of an entertaining book, or from reading self-assuring promises that no writer is in any position to make, but from the satisfaction that comes from seeking truth. We know that, as Lynne Tillman writes in The Inevitable, “Of death, mortals are absolutely ignorant. The dead, fortunately, are beyond caring.” But in the lead-up to our own deaths, our thinking about the end is of the utmost importance to how we live.

Our responses will be as varied as we are—and one of this anthology’s strengths is that in featuring so many writers it has a chance of having something for every reader. You will have your favorite. It might be Joyce Carol Oates’s portrait of grief after losing her husband, Kyoki Mori’s response to her mother’s suicide, or Margo Jefferson’s sociological distillation of the deaths of “Negroland.” Mine is Kevin Baker’s deliberation over whether to be tested for the lethal Huntington’s disease (a rare hereditary condition he had 50/50 odds on), which demands us to imagine what we’d do if our chances of survival were 50/50—and to think about what we will do since our chances are zero.

Not surprisingly, The Inevitable is wildly quotable. Here’s an almost-random sampling of some of the passages underlined in my copy: “If one believes people are dying as soon as they are born, then living itself is an illness overcome only by dying.” (Lynne Tillman) “The solace of anonymity is that it is what bonds us finally with every other human.” (Robin Hemley) “There are some presences whose absence can undo even the strongest people.” (Christopher Sorrentino) “In reality, unlike fiction, people’s lives don’t run according to some overarching narrative.” (Kevin Baker) “Even if one can imagine dying or being dead, one can’t represent it autobiographically.” (Tillman) “Honoring the dead, delighting the living, making the world a safer, nicer place. If that is too humble a definition of art, then one wonders why it is so rarely achieved elsewhere.” (Geoff Dyer)

David Foster Wallace, who Shields and Morrow quote in their introduction, wrote that “a big part of [a writer’s] job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” You’ll find twenty writers here who are doing that same job, giving sustained attention to this most final subject and thereby offering what might be your best hope for redemption.

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 Edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner
University of Chicago Press ($25)

by Patricia Briggs

What does making art look like? Because artists’ studios are considered off limits, it’s pretty hard for the average person to know. Viewers typically encounter the object d’art in the pristine environment of a gallery as a completed thing—the concluding statement of an invisible process. The modern exhibition keeps artists in the shadows so that the artwork “can speak for itself.” While the artist’s studio is necessarily a private space in which artists can work and think, the cloak of mystery that shrouds the studio and blocks dialogue between artists and viewers creates a blind spot that leads to many misperceptions. Happily, such misperceptions are dispelled by The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, edited by public art curator Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, who is not only a painter but also an active critic and co-director of The Suburban, an avant-garde gallery run out of the garage of her Oak Park home. Readers of this book in effect become seminar students in a class on “the space of artists” co-taught by Jacob and Grabner.

Unfortunately, the romantic image of the artist as a sensitive loner is alive and well—in fact, it is still so prevalent that it sentences many artist wannabes to years of frustrating isolation and causes viewers great confusion when they encounter conceptual art, performance art, or installation art which does not correspond to this narrow, outmoded ideal. Countering both the cloak of mystery surrounding the artist’s studio and the stereotype of the artist as heroic outsider, The Studio Reader offers multiple points of entry to its topic, with reprints of meaty historical scholarship and many short meditations on the studio written especially for the volume by artists working today. Here and there, a critic offers their impression on the art world ritual of the “studio visit,” as when Marjorie Welish relays her experiences maneuvering the minefield of ego and insecurity in order to engage artists in critical conversation about their work.

Directly undercutting the mad genius mythology, The Studio Reader opens with entries written by conceptual artists who describe their studios like offices. Buzz Spector lists “every studio I have had since graduating from college”; number one on the list reads: “Second bedroom in an apartment. Drawings made at small thrift shop table and stored beneath bed. One bookshelf, made of boards and concrete blocks, and a four-door file cabinet. Two years”. All fourteen of Spector’s studios since the 1970s are essentially larger variations on the first. John Baldessari recalls passing on an offer of a studio in the early 1970s when he started teaching at CalArts. “By that time, I was a full-fledged conceptual artist. You know, they don’t need studios. God forbid that it leak out that I had studio [laughs]”. Baldessari admits that he has three offices today that house his staff and equipment, and give him a separate space in which to think and make.

Photographs of studio interiors showing bookshelves, stacks of cardboard filing boxes, slide projectors, metal equipment carts, and so on, establish that the artist’s studio isn’t necessarily a place of explosive emotions as it is so often imagined to be, but that it is just as likely a rather dry utilitarian environment. Elsewhere less severe images of the studio appear. Performance artist Michael Smith describes himself as a “Chief Clerk” “puttering” around his studio, retrieving emails, writing lists, and endlessly rearranging stuff, all the time whispering to himself “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”. Rachel Harrison writes, “at times the studio seems like a graveyard of unsuccessful work” and “I find a lot of what I do in the studio pretty embarrassing”. Because the selections written by artists are only a page or two long, I found myself Googling and bookmarking websites; The Studio Reader made me hungry for more information about artists I didn’t know.

The essays that situate the artist’s studio historically are also captivating, if less entertaining that those contributed by artists. In a book weighted toward conceptual art, it is good to see a selection drawn from Svetlana Alpers’s The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (Yale University Press, 2005) chronicling the parallel development of the artist’s studio and the scientist’s laboratory from the 17th through 19th centuries. Tracking what she calls the “changing conditions of pictorial knowledge,” Alpers argues that the studio is an “experimental instrument” which shifts from a “mimetic” use in Vermeer’s time to an “analytic use” in Cézanne’s: “Having begun as a light-box making images of things, the studio becomes, like the mind, tracking basic connections in matter.” A section from Caroline A. Jones’s important bookMachine in the Studio (University of Chicago Press, 1996) charts the shifting definition of the American artist and his studio in the post-war period. Also in The Studio Reader are essays on the gendered space of the studio and artists’ efforts in the 1970s to repurpose derelict buildings for workspaces and quite a lot more.

In a particularly interesting essay devoted to the contemporary moment, Katy Siegel’s “Live/Work” draws connections between young artists’ fascination with “relational aesthetics”—artwork that focuses on participatory events and human interconnectivity—and the new kind of studio that young urban artists today typically rent—small rooms in re-fabricated industrial buildings filled with floor after floor of identical “studios.” Unlike the communal studio that characterized an earlier generation of repurposed industrial buildings, today’s young artists rent studios that have more in common with “the sweatshop and the office cubicle”. “I believe,” Siegle writes, “this more social art . . . expresses a survival instinct amid work conditions that foster isolation”.

The Studio Reader closes with an essay by critic Lane Relyea on the now ubiquitous assemblages constructed out of every kind of found object, raw building materials, cardboard, things that are shiny, and duct tape. Relyea aptly describes this breed of “unmonumental” sculpture as “conglomerations of heterogeneous, loosely related items”. These “mobile units,” he writes, “repurpose already existing objects, sites, and discourses, the aim being to access and link various databases and platforms—maybe immaterial social acquaintances or information, maybe more material pop-culture inventories like old record collection or the intimately biographied yet anonymous cast-offs accumulated in thrift stores”. Identity today, Reylea argues, is similarly mobile and networked though databases constantly accessible through our smart phones and computers. A far cry from the studio as a private and separate place where artists could plumb the depths of their individuality, ”the studio is now that place where we know we can always find the artist when we need to, where she or he is always plugged in and online, always accessible to and by an ever more integrated and ever more dispersed art world”.

Written on request for The Studio Reader, Relyea’s and Siegel’s essays, like so many others in the book, are truly engaged in a living dialogue instigated by the collection’s editors. The Studio Reader covers critical ground and should be required reading for any artist trying to find their footing in today’s art world.

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Graham E. Fuller
Little, Brown and Company ($25.99)

by Spencer Dew

“If there was no Islam,” Graham Fuller argues, “there would certainly be other religions around playing similar roles under similar conditions. With no religions at all, we would still readily find or create other ideologies to justify the same acts. Thus, a world without Islam does not markedly change the nature of things.” Fuller, former CIA Kabul Station Chief and former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, here pads out a 2008 Foreign Policy cover story by imagining an alternative history in which Islam is not a factor. There is open speculation (if Britain had never controlled India, would there have been partition?) and a revision of what Fuller takes to be popular misconceptions. The Crusades, for instance, were motivated primarily by “economic, political, and social” factors, not theological ones. The Reformation, likewise, “exemplifies . . . the intensely political nature of events usually understood as being primarily religious in character.” To focus on religion as a motivating force in such events he considers a mistake; religion “is the vehicle of political confrontation and turmoil, not the cause,” “a means to an end,” a tool used by “political leaders” to manipulate the masses.

The goal of this argument is to clear religion from the practical strategy of American foreign policy. Fuller holds that America must “act as if Islam did not exist in formulating its policies in the Middle East.” Such a stance leads to prescriptions like “no more foreign boots on the ground in Muslim countries,” as a way to delegitimize Bin Laden’s mission by ceding to his demands. Fuller also urges that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be solved, implying that this will be easier than it has appeared over the course of history once negotiators realize that Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the Palestinian problem, and he urges a shift in rhetoric: “‘Zero tolerance for terrorism’ is another slogan that needs to disappear,” he writes, claiming that it is an “empty phrase.” While not offering an apology for terrorist tactics, Fuller insists on their occasional necessity, quoting the Declaration of Independence at length and resuscitating the old semantic saw that one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter.”

That is not the only slippery slope in this strange book. Fuller idealizes religion as something separate from politics. “Sadly,” Fuller writes, “when religion becomes linked with political forces, it tends to lose its soul—its spiritual dimension.” Early in the book, he draws a line between “religion as faith” and “organized religion,” implying that the first is something private and deeply considered, while the other is “a supreme vehicle for many other facets of human aspirations, including politics, fears, drives, prejudices, dreams, and bitterness.” Fuller insists that in those instances when religion voices “prejudices” or “bitterness” it is not authentic, but rather another tool in the Machiavellian toolkit used to manipulate the gullible masses. Certainly religious commitments and symbols are prey to manipulation, but to isolate some form of authentic “religion” from “politics” is not only misleading as an approach to religion, it also obfuscates the complex dynamics of the Islamic ummah, a community which has always been as much about “state” and “power” and “politics” as about faith or the bolstering of ethical claims with eschatological promises.

By reading much of religious history as merely political, Fuller gives us a world in which religion is tangential to Nazi Germany, to Zionism, and to Al Qaeda. Progressing through a selective whirlwind tour of history, Fuller skips from example to example without adequate consideration of context. A foray into China, for instance, supposedly shows that ethnic diversity is “the particular problem, not Islam,” while ignoring the complicated relation of the Chinese government with Islam, long defined as an ethnicity. Most dubious, however, is how the outcome of this book’s speculations seems predetermined. Imagine a world without Islam, and the world looks very much like the one we already know. There’s some hubris and some tragedy in Fuller’s devotion to his own argument, and in the assertion that the path of foreign policy will be somehow clearer if religion is brushed aside.

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Guy de la Valdène
Lyons Press ($24.95)

by Andrew Cleary

Guy de la Valdène is a remnant of what he prefers to call the "sporting life." This means something distinct from the hunting La Valdène observes in his old age, something that hearkens back to a certain nobility in the endeavor that he imbibed in his youth, and his memoir The Fragrance of Grass takes pains to make the distinction.

Born to a life of inherited luxury among the hunting preserves and estates of Normandy, La Valdène has spent the fifty years since his adolescence—when he first took hold of a gun—plotting and executing a long and varied succession of hunts. He trails game across Europe and America, in the far north and the deep south. He has enjoyed, he admits, a life of "idleness and uncomplicated pleasures, an existence of good fortune and sport, of limited accomplishments and few regrets."

Growing up in a French castle, La Valdène learned the pleasures and demands of hunting from raffish gamekeepers, men who celebrated wine and loud company in equal measures. In apprenticeship the young La Valdène would crouch at dawn in the blind of a remote marsh, waiting for the landing of a migrating flock. Or he would march in a line of nobility through the manicured fields of estates, shotgun held at the ready, as servants in an opposite line flushed game from their hiding places. Through these stations of his youth La Valdène came to admire above all the grey partridge, Perdix perdix. "My sporting life begins and ends with Perdix perdix", he says, and it's that bird he hunts through all these varied landscapes, anticipating its presence on his plate.

And yet, though La Valdène has relished from youth the unique pleasures of shooting to kill, he enters his seventh decade with a feeling of bittersweet ambivalence, a sense of the wrongs of hunting which dogs him on his 800-acre Florida farm. It is this ambivalence that animates The Fragrance of Grass, and rescues its author's memories from the chronicle of killings they threaten to become.

"Hunting introduced me to nature half a century ago," says la Valdène, and with each journey to the wild he returns to "a better, more innocent place". There he experiences an "unqualified delight" in his surroundings, and though this delight produces in him a grumbling that hunting is best made for the killing of wild animals, and not simply ones pen-raised for the purpose, it also wakes in him a reverence for the vistas he finds on climbing remote Montana mountains or driving through the wetlands of Sasketchewan.

This reverence sometimes extends to those animals La Valdène kills. With regret he recounts shooting a deer in Scotland, or a box turtle on his farm, each time swearing off the murder of that particular species in the shame he feels in witnessing their death. "Compassion may be one of the few compensations of growing old", he says. He holds up this compassion like a trophy, turning it this way and that, so that we might inspect it with him, as when he finds a five-foot rattlesnake on his farm:

I no longer enjoy killing snakes or any other animals for no reason. But my dogs are small and if, sometime in the future, that snake bit one of them, the dog would probably die. . . . In its death throes, the snake uncoiled off the ground, one last string of venom spraying out its hollow teeth, the late afternoon light catching the stream and coloring it gold.

Since I now am keenly aware of the inevitability of death, when I kill an animal I understand that I have destroyed a part of myself. To mitigate these recurring misgivings, I now say, "I'm sorry," loudly enough for the dogs to hear, even though I am fully aware they plainly don't care.

La Valdène cares, however, and while his caring may sometimes catch on preference—hunting on foot, he says, is better than from a car, in solitude (or with one or two other men of similar sensibility) is better than in a crowd, with a dog is best of all—it carries to a deeply held gratitude for the moral education he has taken from those preferences. Hunting has brought La Valdène in contact with the wild, natural world, and this contact has fostered in him a love for preserving that world as he has found it. Though, admittedly, he wouldn't mind taking a few partridges out of that world for dinner.

For those who might wish to share in the ecstatic experience of the grey partridge, La Valdène includes a short chapter of recipes, most of them adapted from recipes hailing from the Middle Ages or from La Valdène’s memory of meals made by the chef of his childhood estate. The point, it seems, is to enjoy the finer things in life the proper way. If there is such a simple, identifiable ethos to this singular, evocative memoir, it is this.

La Valdène concedes that his life of leisure has given him a strangely privileged vantage on man’s place in nature. But the strangeness and the privilege, once conceded, do not negate La Valdène’s keen powers of observation, contemplation, and thanksgiving. As long as he feels he must hunt, La Valdène figures he may as well make sure to enjoy it:

From an evolutionary point of view, it is absurd for me to think that I should question man's urge to hunt, an urge that has been imprinted on our DNA for 250,000 years. In time, the inclination will undoubtedly disappear from our genes, but for those of us who still live on the land, hunting is as ordinary as eating or sleeping. The quality of the experience is another matter.

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Kevin Grange
University of Nebraska Press ($19.95)

by Barb Teed

“I had to wonder—why are the most beautiful places in the world also the most dangerous?”

The lure of legends and the allure of mountains have possessed the human race for eons. Kevin Grange’s remarkable debut, Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World, merges the myth of the Yeti and the tangible Himalayan mountains into a tension-filled journey through Bhutan, Land of the Thunder Dragon. Grange transports readers on his 216-mile, twenty-four-day Snowman Trek—named for the often sighted, never confirmed, Abominable Snowman. His task, and that of his nine-member trekking party, is to stay alive and complete their journey on what many deem the planet’s toughest trek. “Historically, fewer than 120 people attempt the trek each year, and of those, less than 50 percent finish,” writes Grange.

Surrounded by superstition, trail ghosts, 369 varieties of orchids, and the mystic location of Shangri-La, Grange seeks understanding of his life and the meaning of blossom rain, or metokchharp. Blossom rain, explains Grange, is steeped in Tibetan and Bhutanese folklore. He describes it as that moment of rainbow light when it is rainy and sunny at the same time. When this happens, it’s considered very favorable. “I understood that the moment of blossom rain is auspicious, but I wanted to know why and, more important, what it meant. I had a hunch it would help me on my own journey.”

On the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month in the year of the Fire Pig, or September 24, 2007, he begins his excursion with the Canadian Himalayan Expedition and guide. Grange knows the Snowman Trek is going to be tough—day two, for example, is 13.6 miles with a 2,250-foot-elevation gain, nearly twice the suggested rate for proper acclimatization. His tour group includes sixteen people, thirty horses, twelve tents, and a portable chamber to treat severe altitude sickness. “Everybody cries at some point on the Snowman Trek,” his trail mate informs him.

Constantly facing altitude sickness and inhospitable environments, Grange gradually becomes enamored by fragile plantation, rare animals, and the continual warmth and contradictions of the Bhutanese people. For example, Grange commits to making the trek technology free in order to experience the Zen-like atmosphere. He is amazed when, during a puja ceremony performed by Buddha monks, a priest takes a ringing cell phone from underneath his robe. Similarly, prayer flags Grange describes as the “sacred speed bumps” “on the highway of trails throughout the Himalayas” catch the wind and romance of the Snowman Trek but at the same time conflict with the detailed phallus symbols painted on houses. The pictograms honor not fertility but one of Bhutan’s most famous saints, the Divine Madman.

Grange’s earlier attempt in 2004 to finish Bhutan’s Jhomolhari Trek failed when altitude sickness forced his abandonment. Internal doubt about achieving the Snowman Trek compels examination and conversation within Grange interwoven throughout the book:

But loudest and worst of all was the voice inside my head—my inner critic—that old familiar foe.You have insomnia, it said. No I don’t, I replied. It’s the first sign of altitude sickness. I’m just adjusting. You never should’ve come. Yes I should have. You’re going to quit, waste all your money, and look stupid. No, I won’t. Yes, you will. No! Yes! No!

His search for self follows Grange into Bhutan, a nation promoting Gross National Happiness, and he finds the isolation of the Himalayans strangely comforting: “I’d felt far more remote on a crowded anonymous street in New York City than I ever did on the Snowman Trek.”

Grange successfully blends trail terror with trail humor. Snow camels, or yaks, are traded for horses at higher elevations and present a new set of challenges for the group. “How would I describe the arrival of the yaks? They were like thirty, half-ton first-graders with sharp horns on a field trip.” The hazards of the toilet tent he presents as akin to a lethal combination of Sartre’s No Exit and Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Could the toilet tent be the reason only 50 percent of people finish the Snowman?” he wonders.

Bhutan history and mountaineering lore weave throughout Grange’s writing with a series of flashbacks to early years growing up in New Hampshire. His journalism background crafts a well-researched read, and he effortlessly spins Bhutan’s environment and landscape into screen-worthy images. In the vein of Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place and the film 127 Hours, the book shows why extreme adventuring is so difficult to resist. Readers will forgive Grange’s occasional slips into clichéd slang and will find him, and Beneath Blossom Rain, charming and witty.

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E. P. Thompson
PM Press ($32.95)

by Paul Buhle

A massively popular figure in his British homeland, with his 1963 tome The Making of the English Working Class still widely considered a foundation stone of modern learning, E. P. Thompson was known across the world from the 1950s until his 1993 death also as a global peacenik, anti-nuclear activist, and magnificent orator. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, his first major work (published in 1955), offers a guide to his favorite Romantic, the eco-visionary and Pre-Raphaelite ally who also transformed interior decoration. It is also part of “Spectre,” an auspicious series of classic reprints and new books edited by radical radio host Sasha Lilley.

Thompson’s Morris is the son of a shrewd investor, a product of the bourgeoisie who rejects almost every consequence of its emergence. Despising “shoddy,” Morris sets about creating a studio that turns out extraordinary furniture (including the famous Morris Chair), curtains, upholstery, rugs and assorted materials that in effect repudiate the overstuffed royalism of the age. For inspiration, Morris looked at nature, and more specifically, to the artistic remnants of the otherwise vanished Celts—their love of trees, flowers, birds, and natural designs. He hung out with the circle of artists who sought to recuperate the romance of earlier times and themes of Biblical lore, with human figures too ethereal to be quite human.

Morris, following the logic of his own aesthetics, became a crucial defender not only of old buildings, but also of ancient hedgerows, the rural remnants of a thousand years or more in community life. From there, he went on to found, with a handful of others, the British Socialist movement, funding a weekly newspaper that he edited, and many public events, out of his own pockets. As Thompson unravels the tale, the great designer was ever the romantic but steadily more the revolutionary.

Anarchist no less than Marxist, Morris made the likes of Friedrich Engels uneasy, since “utopianism” smelled of backward-looking dreamers, and Morris was definitely a backward-looking dreamer himself. Besides, Morris seemed to stiff-necked socialists too popular for his own (or their) good, his News from Nowhere offering up a novelistic picture of a future society more dependent on free time than on mechanical marvels.

The massive text of this volume, which revolutionized Morris studies and outraged conservative (and purely literary) specialists, compels the reader to take on these complicated matters bit by bit, almost day to day, sinking into Morris’ life, letters, and milieu. Reading the book can be overwhelming but will be rewarding, not only for the subject but also for the author himself, as we read him through the study of his favorite romantic. A new foreword, by Thompson scholar Peter Linebaugh, offers a lyrical view of the Great Peacenik as well as a close reading of scholarship about Morris before and after Thompson’s text. Morris, we learn, was with Thompson his whole life. Through this book, he is bound to be with us as well.

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Laura Lee Gulledge
Amulet Books ($9.95)

by Stephen Burt

The plot in this perfectly crush-worthy graphic novel couldn't be simpler: Paige Turner (don't snicker: her mom and dad wanted a writer) has moved from bucolic Virginia to Brooklyn Heights, halfway through tenth grade. She's sad to leave her best friend in Charlottesville, but happy to take her new sketchbook everywhere; she tries to draw what she sees, and how she feels, in New York. As her new year unfolds, she makes new friends (they read comics too), starts to kiss and hold hands (it's an all-ages book), and learns to share her work. Paige, her new sort-of-boyfriend, and her new friend Jules ("You are the Hopey to my Maggie") execute life-affirming stunts like tying Easter eggs to neighborhood trees, and Paige learns how and when to talk to her mom.

Most comics about teen life are either so stylized that they can't tell the truth, or intentionally un-pretty, rough, awkward. Page by Paige seems happy to take neither path; with her affable lines, her apparent ease, and her restraint, Laura Lee Gulledge makes Paige's milieu a pleasure to visit, but she also gets it right. It's the kind of teen story that goes with an indie-pop soundtrack, two-thirds we've-all-been-there and one-third you'll-wish-you-met-her. Gulledge, who wrote and drew the whole thing (barring guest panels, on which more below) shows a faultless sympathy with her characters, even when she must know more than they do; her visual style fits their moody innocence, their optimism, and their fears.

It also fits Paige's own artistic ambitions. In her pace, her approach to story, and her degree of detail, Gulledge recalls the Alison Bechdel of Fun Home. But Fun Home was ruled—at times, almost derailed—by its focus on words and the authors of words, on comics as (and as the rival of) "literature," prose memoirs, novels and poems. Page by Paige follows the growth of a visual artist, a teenager whose inner life develops in images, portraits, layouts, scenes; Gulledge can therefore have all sorts of fun with page and gutter, line and half-tone, oneiric distortions and realistic angles, while keeping us wholly immersed in Paige's points of view.

Not just a book about a girl who makes pictures, Page by Paige reminds us what pictures can do, how they can earn our trust, lead us to one another, or let us rebuild ourselves. Sometimes we seem to be looking into Paige's sketchbook, sometimes at what a camera around her would see, sometimes at what's inside her mind. One early two-page spread takes as its backdrop the great foyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "My parents, like most everybody else," Paige muses, "see this version of me: the quiet redhead who draws stuff." While tiny visitors roam stairways and columns, Paige in profile, in foreground, at extreme left, contemplates another Paige, eyes closed, in profile at extreme right. Around this second Paige are smaller Paiges, waving hello, blowing bubbles, fretting, or frowning—they are the other versions of Paige, invisible (so far) except through what she herself draws.

Gulledge, and Paige, use words well: "I try to be open about what I'm into so maybe other people can see a reason to strike up a conversation with me," Paige explains. "I have 'Little Mermaid' hair (which I like to hide behind) . . . And I use all my telepathic strength to emit a 'Please talk to me' vibe." But Paige—like Gulledge—uses words instrumentally: she lives, and the comic thrives, on what she sees. Ironwork streetscapes, intimate close-ups, night skies, crowd scenes, six- and eight- and four- and two-panel layouts, isometric and asymmetrical . . . something new crops up on every page, in Gulledge design and in her choice of what to draw, and yet it all fits the constraints of an all-ages audience.

It fits, too, her sweet and shy and heartbreakingly self-conscious protagonist. Tableaux show Paige lost in a forest of helium balloons; Paige as an old-fashioned switchboard manager, crossing and uncrossing gigantic wires; Page as a Lego figure, a plein-air tightrope walker, a sculptor with her chisel, a were-lynx. One page shows a conversation in Jules's bedroom, its four panels (interrupted by doors, beds, hemlines) either cozy or confined; right after that, an outdoor chat heightens the contrast of indoor and outdoor, intimacy and exploration, by suspending its talking-head panels, one by one, over a two-page view of Brooklyn Bridge.

Gulledge's peppy, photo-packed blogs, whoispaige.com and whoislauralee.blogspot.com, say more about her work and its reception: her friends, as she remarks, resemble Paige's friends. Some of them, as comics artists themselves, contributed single panels or sketches to Page by Paige—the panels that represent work Paige's friends wrote and drew. She wants to be true to them, as well as true to herself, and so her story reveals only her secrets—the panels that would otherwise say what happened "when Jules opened up to me," for example, come obscured by drawings of opaque barriers, cardboard, police tape. It's one of many moments when Gulledge takes her young protagonists as seriously as their strong emotions deserve, while finding a way to play, to explore comics form.

"My pencil can do anything!" roars Paige-as-lynx when she decides to put drawings online; Page by Paige could make you say as much about Paige's creator, whose friendly, approachable take on visual modernism has few equals in any medium. I can describe more panels, or more episodes, from Paige's not so complicated life, but there's no way to say how good it is in only a thousand words; you are invited to see for yourself.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

Dave McKean
Fantagraphics Books ($35)

by Greg Baldino

The difference between erotica and pornography, someone once said, is that the job of erotica is to turn the reader on, while pornography is designed to get them off. It’s a tricky game to play with someone you know, let alone an unknown reader; often times, one cracks open an erotic novel to find that the author has conceded to succeeding at half the job rather than risk failing at the full effort. To make a sincere effort at the former, though, requires a different style of storytelling. Seduction and nuance take precedent over engagement and detail; as with the other emotive genres of horror and comedy, erotica must appeal to the heart as much as to the mind.

In Dave McKean’s latest graphic novel, Celluloid, a woman arrives at her lover's apartment. Frustrated when he calls to tell her he's stuck at the office, she takes a bath, then while still naked, discovers a film projector sitting in his living room. Running the film on one of the apartment's bare walls, she discovers it to be a pornographic film of a woman in a carnival mask having sex. Though the movie captivates her, the film overheats and melts at its (and her) climax. Yet even though the film is broken, the camera projects the image of a door on the wall, which the woman opens and enters.

On the other side, she finds herself in a progression of erotic worlds, each one varied both in its encounters and the artistic style in which they are rendered. In each world the exit to the next is made present just as the experience begins to peak, finally culminating in the realization of her desires through transformation. Presented without words, the story unfolds through full-page illustrations utilizing McKean's stills in pen and ink, expressionist painting, and photo collage. In the opening sequence, the book comes closest to conventional graphic novel territory. As the woman enters the apartment, she calls out for her lover, but rather than words, her speech balloon is filled with the image of her lover. Once within the worlds though, the narrative has less in common with comics than with silent film, or perhaps ballet. Expression and movement take precedent here; there's no names, no backstory. We are instead given an almost poetic succession of images, which together present a dreamlike exploration of erotic vistas.

Celluloid is a return to traditional McKean graphic storytelling, in that it's not like anything he's done before. Known in comics primarily for his longtime association with writer Neil Gaiman, with whom he collaborated on the childhood memory-based graphic novels Violent Cases and Mr. Punch, and the serialized meditation on mortality and creation Signal to Noise, McKean's solo work includes the sweeping kitchen-sink-magical-realism graphic novel Cages and the short story collection Pictures That Tick. Along with Celluloid, these books explore human interactions, desires, and motivations through a variety of narratives and artistic styles.

Though clearly an erotic graphic novel, its mixed-media stylings and almost musical pacing put it a far distance from the elegant lust of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's equally ambitious Lost Girls. Though both present stories driven forward by sex, Moore and Gebbie’s work is more of a baroque exegesis of sexuality, while Celluloid prefers to be more enigmatic and lingering. The woman's encounters are thorough in their surreality; in one scene a many-breasted woman with grapes for hair cavorts in Sapphic indulgence against a field of springtime green, and in another, a bright and leering devil with an almost Art Nouveau condition of priapism cavorts, glowing red with lust in the darkness.

Celluloid is a challenging work, not so much in how it is read, but in how it pushes at the boundaries of what we call a graphic novel and what we consider erotica. The wordless images McKean presents take up whole pages, sometimes two. Very few of the pages break into separate "panels," giving the book a consistent pacing. When he takes a sight and spreads it across two pages, it gives weight and resonance to the moment, drawing the note out. And the lack of dialogue or any narrative text leaves each visual to linger as long as the reader permits. It's a strong break from the conventional page layouts of well-crafted comic stories, which are generally composed to lead the reader’s eye and create the deception of time. It further challenges the designation of graphic “novel” in that the length and scope of the story is more akin to a short story of magical realism. Though visually it is a rich and nuanced work, as a narrative it lacks overt depth and complexity. The characters are never named, and the interpersonal relationship between The Woman and Her Lover is barely hinted at. (This being erotica, it’s easy to assume that the pair are lovers, but as the book is devoid of text save for the dust jacket flap, any number of possible relationships could be possible.)

Considered as a visual ode to the erotic imagination, Celluloid is a powerful work of grace and deviance in its explorations. McKean has crafted a new grammar for comic book storytelling, bringing the printed page as close to a live performance as possible while still using the graphic narrative form to accomplish what no other medium can.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

by Sarah Peters

The garage at 3310 15th Avenue S. looks like any other in South Minneapolis. It has a wide bluish-grey door with prominently placed house numbers and sits next to a tidy wooden fence that encloses the adjacent yard. If you were walking by on your way to Powderhorn Park you probably would not think anything of it. But, come July, a sign and a doorbell will designate this common domestic structure as the Zine Apothecary, a warm weather-dependent library of zines.

Zines—remember those? The story of these small, handmade pamphlets devoted to personal narration and counter-cultural musings begins in the 1930s, with science fiction fanzines. While a proper history is too much to relate here, it’s safe to say that many people think of zines as a product of the pre-blog era, when punk rockers, anarchists, and riot grrls laid their thoughts down in glue-and-paste manifestos. This is true, but it’s not a bygone tale. Photocopied collages may have taken a backseat to the YouTube mash-up for some, but today’s zine culture is still kicking.

One of the Twin Cities’ most outspoken advocates for the form is Lacey Prpić Hedtke, a Minneapolis artist, zinester, and the librarian of the aforementioned Zine Apothecary. When I met her at a book/zine/print fair at the Walker Art Center a few years back, I was immediately drawn to her publication, Likes/Dislikes. Published in two editions, these slim booklets contain just what the title suggests: an inventory of the author’s favorite things alongside those she deems less savory.

I was pleased to see that the author and I both frown upon “worry about employment,” “George W Bush and associates,” and “overhead lighting,” but share an approval of “internet radio” and “when cats drink out of faucets.” But her expressions of taste are appealing for their universality as much as for the coincidence of shared quirks—everyone dislikes “rude people.”These lists present a portrait not only of their maker’s eccentricities, but of a particular cultural moment.

In addition to making zines, Prpić Hedtke is a photographer who works with antiquarian processes. In a recent conversation at her dining room table, surrounded by zines and tintype experiments, she explained her interest in the oldest forms of photographic image making. “With digital photography, and to a certain extent in a black and white darkroom, the artist has all the control,” she says. Working with 19th-century photography amounts to “collaboration with the materials—they have a life of their own.” And she prefers it that way. On one ofher blogsshe writes, “I can’t wait for this digital photography trend to be over, and everyone can get back to the business of beautiful image making and crafting.”

Like any craft, zines are all about the hand of the maker. The basic process to create one is simple—cut, glue, photocopy, fold, staple—but can be quite complex, too, depending on the maker’s artistic interests. As a book artist myself, I appreciate the effort made to create zines, given the wide availability of faster methods of publication. But still - since their contents are often intimate in nature, and since the web offers so many tools for this kind of sharing, why go to the trouble to make a zine when you can write a blog?

In a long discussion on the value of the materiality of zines in her book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (2009), Alison Piepmeier offers some reasons why many of the zinesters she interviewed choose to work in paper instead posting their ideas online. Many of their answers were about material choice: paper, typography, cover stock—all the aesthetic decisions that a book maker considers to flesh out the concept of a work. This makes perfect sense: Would you ask a writer who prints in letterpress why she doesn’t just keep a blog? No, because the handmade quality of the object matters. Indeed, it’s the point.

That’s not to say these makers aren’t adept at using new technologies. Piepmeier talked to a lot of women who make zines as well as write blogs—this analog/digital combination is the way craft goes these days. There is a zine-makers contingent on Etsy; over 3,400 members are registered on wemakezines.com (a network not unlike mnartists.org); and you can track your favorite zine-maker from anywhere in the world via the website for famed distributor Microcosm Publishing. It’s a natural pairing, really—the world of zines has always been about networks, well before the internet came along to connect us. As Stephen Duncombe wrote, in the first academic study of underground zine culture in 1997, “Zines are profoundly personal expressions, yet as a medium of participatory communication they depend upon and help create community.”¹ To be a zinester is to join with a dedicated band of readers and makers who build kinship by gifting handmade objects to one another. The web enables this community to keep in touch and disseminate certain ideas faster, but the limitations of pre-designed blog formats and sleek screens aren’t a substitute for of creating with ink and paper.

Back at the 3300 block of 15th Ave, Prpić Hedtke is motivated primarily by a desire to get all of this tangible material into people’s hands. To that end, this past spring, she began the monumental task of completing the catalog for the collection. To date, the Zine Apothecary holds roughly 1,500 zines, 700 of which are duplicates. The artistry in these volumes is all over the map—you’ll find barely legible photocopies alongside commercially printed newsprint. Sheets of 8.5 x 11 office paper folded in half are standard, and every once in a while the pages are enclosed by a silk-screened cover. Some zines are hand-sewn with yarn, some are perfect bound, but most are stapled.

You won’t find the Dewey decimal system at work in the Zine Apothecary. Prpić Hedtke’s invented taxonomy categorizes zines by subject rather than by author or title. The topics represented lean strongly toward radical politics and theory, Minneapolis punk rock history, cooking, gardening, feminism, and how-to manuals. They reflect the interests of the various subcultures out of which zines come, but also the origins of the collection. Much of the material is from the Bat Annex Library and Free School, a now defunct, volunteer-run, anarchist education space, where Prpić Hedtke was a de facto librarian. When the Bat Annex closed she stewarded the paper matter to “offsite storage” (someone’s basement) where it was joined by a donation from the Stephens Square Center for the Arts. All the while, Prpić Hedtke was in library school. Upon graduation, with degree in hand, she dug out those boxes with renewed determination to make the archived zines available to readers.

Accessibility is a complicated issue for documents like zines. They are made of and for a particular community, so in some ways it seems they should stay with their people. At the same time, these publications chronicle culture that is underrepresented in mainstream publishing, so adding them to the stacks of traditional libraries helps to fill in critical gaps in “official” history, with the notion of making their ideas available to a broader audience. Part of the trouble is that libraries and historical societies with missions to preserve things have a way of making those very materials less available to ordinary readers. Barnard College librarian Jenna Freedman warns that some libraries with zine collections keep them in closed stacks, where archivists have to fetch selections for viewers rather than allowing readers to browse.² This model is essential to preserving rare books, but zines don’t come out of this sort of rarified environment. They’re everyday objects put together with readily available supplies—quite possibly stolen from Kinko’s. Zines are meant to be sent through the post, read on the bus, and strewn about on the coffee table, not held on climate controlled shelves.

The Zine Apothecary provides a model for a way these cultural artifacts can be made publicly available, carefully preserved in a way that’s at home with the form’s DIY roots. This is important for Prpić Hedtke, who wants to see the zines stay in their community and be used as resources. Say you need instructions for fixing your bike, or you want to read about motherhood from a feminist perspective. There are plenty of ways to find such information online, but the Apothecary provides a space where indigenous knowledge and experience can be physically shared with others—and that’s a bedrock concept of the zine world. The curious can browse the stacks and strike up conversation; perhaps the other researchers at the library will have the expertise you’re looking for—maybe you’ll come across the author of the very zine held in your hands.

Someday Prpić Hedtke hopes the collection will reside in a space with more resources—something akin to the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR, where a zine library is accompanied by paid staff, a computer lab, a letterpress, a copy machine, and rentable workspace. But given that such a project is expensive and involved, for now, homeownership has provided the immediate, more practical solution: a garage. The Apothecary may not have institutional comforts like bathrooms and heat, but the essential amenities will still be present: plenty of things to read and a comfortable chair in which to do so.

¹ Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from underground: zines and the politics of alternative culture.
Verso, 1997. pg. 65
² Freedman, Jenna. 2004 http://zines.barnard.edu/about/notblogs

AMONG PENGUINS
A Bird Man in Antarctica
Noah Strycker
Oregon State University Press ($19.95)

THE EXULTANT ARK
A Pictoral Tour of Animal Pleasure
Jonathan Balcombe
University of California Press ($34.95)

LET THEM EAT SHRIMP
The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea
Kennedy Warne
Island Press ($25.95)

LISTED
Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act
Joe Roman
Harvard University Press ($27.95)

by Scott F. Parker

You can tell from the titles here under review that the issue at stake is the interaction between humans and the other 3–30 million (and crashing) animals that share this planet. You can also guess that one takeaway message from these books is roughly that the situation is not good. What distinguishes these books from one another, besides their varied foci, is their approach to the question of how we think of animals—as naturally occurring pieces of a complicated ecosystems that we require for our own flourishing or as beings that are somehow worthwhile in their own right.

It’s a distinction that engaged the likes of John Muir, who as he aged turned his public writing toward nature’s utility for us, realizing this as a more effective conservation strategy than complaints like “How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of the rest of creation!” which he saved for his journals. When we do extend our sympathies it’s usually in the direction of animals most suitable for our anthropomorphism. We’re much less likely to make efforts to protect fish, reptiles, crustaceans, or plants than we are, say, penguins.

Noah “Bird Man” Strycker’s Among Penguins is not a work of conservation literature but a travelogue about a summer spent in Antarctica collecting data on Adélie Penguins. Yet in recounting his time on the ice, he can’t help but make the reader care deeply for the penguins that so enthuse him. Strycker and two research partners are delivered by helicopter from McMurdo Station to Cape Crozier, where 250,000 penguins reside. The background science and history you need to understand what they’re doing is easy to follow, and the penguin depictions capture their curious personalities. About his first encounter, Strycker writes,

It made two more complete circuits of our group, pausing to assess various views. Then, amazingly, it settled down a few inches from the ice drill, stretched on its belly, and took a nap. I sat just a few feet from the sleeping penguin. Such trust was incredible in a wild bird. Only in one other place had I seen this behavior in seabirds: the Galapagos Islands. There, as in Antarctica, wildlife evolved without human predators and lacks the fear of people.

Besides Antarctica and the Galapagos, Strycker has studied birds in Hawaii, Panama, and his native Oregon, among other places—and it is the birds, not the continent, that draw him to Antarctica. So he’s often as out of place as the reader would be in his position: “It is difficult to describe the interior of a subzero hurricane because the experience involves so much disorientation. Imagine standing on the roof of a car traveling a hundred miles per hour on the freeway, in a blizzard, while wearing twenty pounds of insulation, and you begin to get the idea.” Such descriptions are only enhanced with the spectacular photos of birds, ice, people, and shelter included mid-book.

Strycker is quite young, and his list of accomplishments is wildly impressive. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to condescend to his peers who are pursuing more traditional careers, interrupting what is otherwise a generous and inspiring insider tale. There is much to learn from Strycker’s love and study of penguins. As the ice of Antarctica melts, the northern penguin populations are shrinking drastically, but southern populations are flourishing. It remains to be seen what will happen with further melting, but penguins “could become major indicators of climate shifts,” and learning to care about them and their fate might provide a motivation to limit CO₂ emissions.

Of course, penguins are cute and friendly. What about animals that are neither? In The Exultant Ark, Jonathan Balcombe attempts to make us care about animals by breaking down the dichotomies we rely on to hold up the distinction between human and non-, dichotomies like which animals are capable of play, gustatory pleasure, companionship, and love.

Discussion of animal behavior is very often limited to the language of evolution; every trait is understood as occurring for some procreative advantage it affords. But whatever the causes of an animal’s behavior, there is still the question of the animal’s subjective experience. Balcombe argues that “evolutionary and experiential sorts of explanations are not mutually exclusive.” For any one observation there are two explanations available. When a pod of dolphins surf the wake of a passing boat, “an adaptationist interpretation is that they are saving energy. An experiential interpretation is that they are having a blast.” No dog owner will disagree with Balcombe’s position that it feels like something to be an animal and that that something can be pleasurable. The more difficult (and more important) sell for Balcombe is to get us to think not just about the animals we have personal relationships with, but about animals in general, so that we might reconsider the many severe cruelties we inflict on animals of all kinds.

The studies he invokes are hard to explain away. For example, when reading that “many studies show that rodents and other animals prefer foraging to eating from a food dish and that they develop psychological illnesses when chronically deprived of opportunities to perform important survival behaviors,” one might think back to when box cake manufacturers found that requiring a single egg to be added left the baker with a feeling of investment and increased satisfaction with the final product that went missing when no egg was needed. Likewise, the photographs that make up the bulk of The Exultant Ark remind us that we are not as different from other animals on our planet as we like to think; the photos are anecdotal in nature, but they are utterly compelling. Whether it’s sea otters linking paws or a marmot sniffing flowers, one must be quite disciplined to have a first response of “that looks like a survival strategy” rather than “they look happy.” One of the real knock-down arguments for animals enjoying pleasure for pleasure’s sake comes from the wild ubiquity of homosexual and autoerotic sex, most famously in female bonobos, who “engage in a bout of GG rubbing [clitoris on clitoris] about once every two hours.” One powerful and unavoidable takeaway from this book is that “if intelligence were defined as the pursuit of happiness, perhaps dolphins or crows might outsmart us.” More controversial is the author’s argument that “the roots of our ill treatment of animals lie in . . . the same sorts of prejudices that justified colonialism, fostered slavery, and barred women from the right to vote.” But there are worse readings of our species’ history than to say those with power have tended to exercise it against those without. Empathy is prerequisite to morality, so just look at those seals in love. Just look.

Recognition of our similarities to other animals and the urge to improve their habitats is not the only reason to take up environmental conservation: what’s bad for other animals is, by and large, bad for us. Consider the world’s mangroves. The state of the rainforests of the sea is dire and Let Them Eat Shrimp is as inevitable as it is devastating to read. Journalist Kennedy Warne has long been fascinated with mangroves and describes them with amour: “They are so thickly encrusted with marine organisms that they are like living paintings—Kandinsky canvases of vibrant color and form.” Warne first wrote about mangroves on assignment for National Geographic; while visiting mangroves around the world he came to see the social and environmental destruction of these regions, and how vigorously they must be protected. Though they make up only 0.1 percent of land surface, their virtues are almost too many to name. Harvested sustainably, they provide “honey, timber, seafood, thatching materials, fruits, medicines, tea, sugar,” among other goods for people who live in their proximity. They also protect land and people from tropical storms, prevent soil erosion, promote biodiversity, and are major carbon sinks—storing it and transporting it to the ocean.

Unfortunately, due largely to shrimp farming, which profits in the same conditions where mangroves flourish, mangroves are among the most stressed ecosystems on Earth. “Shrimp consumption in the United States nearly tripled between 1980 and 2005, while the price halved.” Meanwhile more and more mangrove forests are converted from public assets to private shrimp farms to abandoned wastelands so full of toxins that mangroves cannot even regrow without extensive and expensive rehabilitation. Warne importantly reads the mangrove fiasco in economic terms, too, identifying the market’s failure to account for its environmental destruction that it writes off as an externality. Of course, while destroying an ecosystem may be external to any given balance sheet, it’s not external the life of a single person on this planet. “To walk in a mangrove forest is to become aware of the interlocked worlds of land and sea, human and wild.” The book puts one simple question to the reader: is destroying a rich and crucial environment, ruining the lives and livelihoods of local peoples, and increasing our collective strain on the planet, worth it for cheap shrimp?

A broader look at the state of animals comes from Joe Roman, who in Listed looks back at the history of the Endangered Species Act (signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1973), declaiming its success and arguing for broader conservation efforts than those enumerated in that legislation. In so doing, he reports first-hand from the scenes where animals (and some plants) under the protection of the ESA are excelling, struggling, and no longer observed in the wild.

One of Roman’s strategies to improve conditions in these locales is to look at the economic costs of preservation and show that rather than an economic restraint it is often an economic benefit. A group of scientist in Santa Barbara calculated “the value of all the services provided by all the ecosystems, from the forest to the floodplains to the open ocean, across the world” to be $33 trillion a year. As one example of how nature could be worth more than all the world’s economies combined, studies have found that “every dollar invested in protecting watersheds can save up to $200 in costs for new water treatment and filtration facilities.” Similar numbers can be found for forests, mangroves, wolves, pigeons, almost anything you can think to look at. “For every dollar [New York City] spends on maintaining and planting street trees, the city earns $5.60 in benefits . . . [they] absorb lung-damaging sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. They absorb ozone and carbon monoxide.”

The big problem is that the economic models we rely on take unlimited resources as a given. But our forests are no longer plentiful and our oceans are no longer full of fish (over 90% of large fish have now been killed), so Roman encourages us to find new economic value in preserving what remains (and if possible regrowing some of what we’ve lost). One objection to such an economic defense is that it seems to imply that we should only make environmental investments that we expect to yield positive returns. What if saving, say, tigers is a net cost rather than a net gain—should we let them die? Is that the kind of world we want to live in? But, in invoking economics, Roman isn’t beholden to it. He brings morality and species survival into his argument:

The best response may be to do everything we can for the polar bear, the freshwater mussel, the endangered scrub mint, and the whale. There are many ethical reasons to protect all the species on Earth; climate change has added another practical one: protecting biodiversity will store and absorb CO₂.

The situation in the U.S., just as on the rest of our planet, is that we’re slaughtering our ecosystems and the flora and fauna they comprise. “Some call our epoch the Anthropocene, as human influence is now planetary in scale. Others have dubbed it the Catastrophozoic or the homogecne.” Whatever you call it, “1600 is a benchmark year; then the age of extinction began in earnest,” roughly two hundred years before the concept of extinction was first taken seriously.

For the reader who struggles to imagine how it was that “until thirteen thousand years ago, North America had more large animals than present-day Africa,” the work of Jared Diamond is a good place to turn. In Guns, Germs, and Steel he describes the combination of accidents of human history that allowed us to conquer the world in the way we have (q.v., like the penguins of Antarctica, and unlike the lions and elephants of Africa, the megafauna of North America didn’t evolve in the company of our upstart species and never acquired the caution required to survive our presence). And more relevant to the outcomes all four of these books want to prevent is Collapse, in which Diamond shows the common features of several societal collapses, most prominently: failure to handle ecosystem destruction. Is this our collapse? The ice of Antarctica seems unlikely to stop melting; the shrimp we add to our salads are destroying the planet’s mangroves; the animals we harm with negligence and intentional cruelty are capable of profound suffering; the economy we pretend will expand forever does have limits; the loss of animals and plants we are undergoing threatens to destroy the environments we need to survive. Et cetera.

Rhetorically, an inspirational sendoff is expected here (and three of the books under review do offer one). But we already know in essence, what they ask: sacrifice in some form, and compassion. It will be hard and it might not succeed. As Roman puts it, “Reducing consumption and stabilizing the human population, even humanely reducing it, will improve the lives of people and wildlife . . . It is nothing short of a reexamination of our lives and values.” So if you’re looking for something positive to end on, here’s something you can count on: geologically speaking, we haven’t been around long and we probably won’t be around much longer. However many animals we kill, even if we kill ourselves, destruction of the Earth itself will take something bigger than us, and there’s some comfort in that.

Click here to purchase Among Pengins at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Exultant Ark at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Let Them Eat Shrimp at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Listed at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011