The World Without Us

Alan Weisman
St, Martin's Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34729-1
ISBN-10: 0-312-34729-4

What would happen on the Earth if, one day, all the people suddenly disappeared? Alan Weisman suggests some kind of Universalist rapture or mass exodus with the help of space aliens as a vehicle for our departure so that he can continue with his thought experiment. How would nature deal with everything left behind by 21st century humanity?

Weisman looks at several places in the world,remaining vestiges of the of the pre-human world and case studies for his thought experiment. Bialowieza Puszcza is a vestigal old growth forest on the border between Poland and Belarus. It is not untouched by man, of course, but has been preserved since the middle ages as a royal hunting preserve and as a national park. The wisent, the European bison, is still in residence there along with deer, wild boars an other European large mammals. No aurochs, sadly. Weisman suggetsts that a forest like Bialowieza Puszcza could once again cover most of Europe.

The subways, tunnels and buried streams on Manhattan would suddenly fill with water. New York pumps thousands of gallons of water every day out of it's underworld. When the pumps stop all would go underwater. This water would rust out the steel structure holding New York up, cause the streets to become canals, the buried streams to re-emerge and the tall buildings to fall. Central Park would become the source of seed to reestablish a forest on the island, wildlife would cross the bridges, soon to collapse from rust and lack of maintenance, and repopulate the island. Rats and cockroaches would die off without the support of their human hosts to feed them and heat their homes. - That's a good thing, Martha.

Houston would become a huge oil and chemical spill which would pollute the ship canal and cause problems for life far out into the Gulf of Mexico. Over time, Weisman hopes, nature would heal the mess, as it is doing for Prince William Sound. It could take centuries.

Nuclear power plants need us to keep them from melting down. Nature would move right in to te contaminated areas, however, as it has done at Chyrnobl An article that he wrote about the aftermath of Chernobyl is, in fact, the inspiration for this book. Grasses, trees, animals and human squatters have occupied the contaminated zone around the ruined nuclear plant, and will pay the inevitable penalty in increased cancers and birth defects.

The worlds oceans would recover, over time, coral reefs would come back and, interestingly, Weisman predicts that the oceans would soon be filled with huge sharks and other large predators. Some studies have suggested that, in a healthy, balanced ocean, much of the biomass is stored in large carnivores, and not is the smaller herbivores and plants as on land. This is because to the rapid rate of reproduction of small fish and of plankton, corals and other marine life, which is quickly eaten. The large carnivores live longer and store that energy, to be recycled years later, when they die of natural causes.

There is no big message in The World Without Us, no doomsday prophecy. Weisman simply wanted to think about the effect humanity has had on the world and his method for doing so was to imagine our sudden withdrawal. He does suggest that the Earth might miss us if we went away. Humanity is a part of nature, too.

Princess

A man's affair with a boat
Joe Richards
Susan Richards, Pub.
JoeRichardsPrincess.com



Years ago, my friend Johnson, the man with two last names, lent me an old yellowed hardback book called "Princess, New York." He told me that I had to read it and that it was a great story of an artist, who had bought a 60 year old Friendship sloop at the tail end of the great depression and sailed away in it, looking for an island. Johnson is a lover of old crankity wooden boats. He has one of his own that is just turning 44 this year, which keeps him gainfully employed in order to pay the repair bills.

Eventually Johnson got the idea to find the boat "Princess" and have it restored and put in a museum somewhere. He made a lot of telephone calls and even traveled to Florida, the last known location of the boat, to no avail. He did meet Joe Richards' daughter Susan, though, and his obsessive behavior regarding "Princess" gave her the idea that a new edition of the book was in order.

Johnson was right about one thing. "Princess" is one heck of a good read. Joe Richards was an artist, living in New York who discovered, on Long Island, the ruins of an old sloop, built in the 1870s in Friendship Maine. He bought the thing and then found himself learning the craft of wooden boat repair. Eventually Richards set off down the inter-coastal waterway, headed for Florida and an as yet to be discovered island, where he would live happily ever after- or something.

The book is a well written memoir of an impractical quest for an undefined goal, interrupted by the Second World War. There are many asides, stories of adventures in the merchant marine during the war, as Richards tell the tale of his journey down the inter-coastal to Florida.

In book II, when Richards has acquired a wife and two children, he decides to escape New York for Key Biscayne, bringing his family and sailboat along with him. In this book the mysterious island, or at least an island, is finally discovered.

There are several small color prints of Joe Richards' paintings in the book as well. The book cover illustration above is a fair example. Take a peek at the website JoeRichardsPrincess.com for more examples.

My Colombian War

A Journey Through The Country I Left Behind
Silvana Paternostrro
Henry Hold and Company
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7605-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7605-9

Silvana Paternostro is the daughter of a prominent, relatively wealthy family from Barranquilla, at the mouth of the Magdalena river on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. As a child she was sent to a boarding school in the United States, stayed here through college and became a freelance journalist, living in New York. My Colombian War is the story of her return to Barranquilla in an attempt to understand the half century of war with the FARC and it's effect on her family and her country. FARC is the acronym for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or in English, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

As a college student Paternostro had a Che Guevara poster on her dorm room wall. She was enamored of the romanticized image of the revolutionary freedom fighters, striking, out of the jungle, for justice. What she found in Colombia was a different story.

Her mother's family were large landowners, having a finca, a large farm, where cattle, then cotton and finally palm oil were produced. The relationship between her grandfather and the people who worked on the finca was feudal in nature. He was the patron and they the peons, yet it was also a kind of extended family, where the patron extended his influence and even wealth to benefit those peons. No social security existed, no retirement accounts, no health insurance. All this was provided, or not, through the generosity of the patron. Some members of the finca families still worked in Paternostro's grandmother's home in Barranquilla at the time of the visit described in the book.

Paternostro's uncle now manages the farm and is turning it into a modern agribusiness enterprise, with higher pay scales, retirement benefits, and medical insurance for the employees, all through the profits from the export of palm oil. He has to do so through hired managers, though, because the entire family is under threat of kidnapping by the FARC and he does not dare to travel out into the country. He and Silvana plan and execute a daring visit, flying in a small airplane, for a day on the farm, escaping again by air before the FARC can learn of their presence.

The FARC has two main sources of income, one is through taxing of the illegal drug trade, basically providing protection for the growers and dealers in cocaine and heroin, and the other is kidnapping for ransom. Silvana finds, when she arrives home that she is automatically a target for kidnapping because her matronymic surname is Montblanc, the name of her French descended grandfather. Any person associated by name with one of the large landholding families is a target. Spanish speaking people use both their father's and mother's surnames and those familiar with the system and the area can identify a person precisely by that persons two names. She is Silvana Paternostro Montblanc on her Colombian identity card.

The book My Colombina War is about the internal struggle Paternostro has over the differences between her life in the United States and the life of her family and friends in Colombia, about the feudal relationship she has with her grandmothers household staff, and with the woman who was given to her as a companion when they were both small children. It is about the romanticized ideal of the revolutionary in her head and the cruel reality of the drug dealing, kidnapping FARC, abut the fear they impose on everyone's daily life. It is about the highly stratified society she finds when she visits her parents in their home in Bogota and the relative freedom from class distinctions she has become used to in the United States.

Colombia is an oligarchic society, where the rich are richer and the poor are poorer, torn by war and crime, yet where people appear to be happy in their lives. It is undergoing change slowly, not because of, but in spite of the FARC. Sylvana Paternostro has become a Nortamericana, uncomfortable in the land of her birth, yet forever tied to it.

Six Word Memoir Meme

I was tagged by Book Calendar to write a six word memoir:

This is my memoir, posted in honor of Oprah and all her guest authors.

Don't believe a word I say.

This is an example of what Nancy Milford calls the false memoir and also of Epimenides paradox.

Here are the rules if I tagged you.

1. Write your own six word memoir.

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post.

4. Tag five more blogs with links.

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!"

I'm tagging:

Aunti Dar

Freida Bee

Mr. Grudge

Mystic Veg

The Galloping Beaver

I very politely request their participation.

mememememememememe

I have more than one blog, so when I was tagged over at
ROTUS with this literary meme, needing an excuse to post an between books post here, so I don't lose my readership, I tagged myself with it.

So here’s the rules of the Meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

It just happens, ahem, that I am sitting here with the book that I intend to review next, if I ever get some time to sit down and read, "My Colombian War" by Silvana Paternostro. Paternostro is a Colombian born American journalist who returned to Colombia to cover the war against the FARC.

On page 123 the fifth, sixth and seventh sentences span a change in paragraphs, so I will put that break in.

We formed a unit so tight that we came to be known a the English Girls, named for our love of the language.

When a boy liked you in Barranquilla, he would manifest it by driving in front of your house. It was called "the pass."

I am going to tag Book Calendar, Colorado Cowgirl in Upstate New York, Daddy Papersurfer, Discovering Dad and La Rochelle. I know that DP is off in Portugal, taking surfing lessons from Penfold, so he could be a while responding. Silvie will probably post something in French, which will add a bit of class around here. Cowgirl owes me for having memed me with that Big Bang thing and then deleting it from her own blog. BC can do this in his sleep but I hope he wil come up with an unusual book.

Fair Game

My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House
Valerie Plame Wilson
Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3761-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-3761-9

Valerie Plame Wilson tells the story of her ❚❚❚❚❚❚ year career as a CIA covert operations officer. Plame became interested in a career at the CIA and applied for a job there right out of college at the University of Pennsylvania in ❚❚❚❚, on the recommendation of her mother who had seen a CIA recruiting announcement in a ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ newspaper.

Plame underwent rigorous training at "the farm," the CIA's not very secret training facility at Camp Peary near ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚, VA. She had her first assignment in ❚❚❚❚❚❚, working under State Department cover to recruit local political and business people as agents, to provide information to the CIA. She returned to the US, attended graduate school and was assigned by the CIA to work as a NOC (no official cover) officer in ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ where she was in danger of exposure and possible prosecution, because she lacked diplomatic immunity.

❚❚❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚. ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚. ❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚.

Valerie Plame met Ambassador Joe Wilson, during a visit back to Wasington DC when she attended a party at the ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ Embassy. Both of them were attending the party as part of their official duties. They continued to see each other and when both moved back to Washington they married. Joe WIlson retired from government service after serving as Senior Director for African Affairs in the Clinton Administration, while Valerie Wilson continued to work on nuclear proliferation issues at the CIA. She was head of the ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ unit at the time that Vice President ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ office inquired about a report of an Iraqi attempt to purchase raw uranium ore from Niger.

Her story of "the sixteen words" and how they came to be in President Bush's State of the Union Address and of the op ed piece that Ambassador Wilson wrote is ❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚. Questions of ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ and ❚❚❚❚❚ restraint of publication are raised as well as doubts about the impartiality of the ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ under the Bush administration.

The book is a bit hard to read in places because of all the redactions. It was hard to publish, too and lawsuits are still going through the appeals process. Fortunately, most of the informateion that is ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚ is publicly available through other sources and has been included in an afterword, written by Lara Rozen.

Escaping The Delta

Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
Elijah Wald
Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-052423-5

The blues was a polished, professional style of popular music and Robert Johnson was a talented but little known blues performer; so says Elijah Wald. Wald makes a good argument for this proposition, which does not detract from the fact that Robert Johnson's twenty nine recorded songs contain a unique and wonderful set of performances. The blues, as it was understood in the 1920s, when Johnson was growing up, was music made by theatrically decked out women, "blues queens" like Ida Cox and Bessie Smith, who performed with jazz orchestras and sang in vaudeville theaters. Piano and guitar duos would play the blues in dance halls and guitar, fiddle and banjo players would play an older style of dance music at square dances.

Guitarists like Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller were often found playing in country "jukes" or on street corners until they became local hits, after being recorded during "field recording" sessions by the newly emerging record companies. It was during two of these field recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937, that Johnson laid down the tracks that led to his eventual crowning as "King of the Delta Blues." Unfortunately for him, Johnson's records did not sell well in his own time, although they made a big impression on a New York concert promoter and record executive, John Hammond.

In 1938 Hammond was putting together an extravaganza for Carnegie Hall, "From Spirituals to Swing," which was to feature Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mitchell's Christian Singers, Count Basie's Orchestra and, he hoped, Robert Johnson. Unfortunately Jonson died, probably murdered, before Hammond could find him and bring him to New York.

Because Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 27 he was unable to develop, as did his traveling companion Johnny Shines, into a mature country blues performer, or become a sophisticate "folk" musician as did his contemporary, Josh White, or go electric like Muddy Waters or go into jazz like Charlie Christian. We don't know what might have been.

Some of Robert Johnson's recordings were re-released on an LP in 1961 "King of the Delta Blues Singers." This album influenced The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Dave Van Ronk and any number of modern musicians, who have created a kind of cult of Robert Johnson. Elijah Wald was, and is still, a member of that cult, but here, he attempts to set the record straight.