The E-Reader: a roundup of new ebooks
Updated 8:57 pm, Thursday, June 26, 2014
By Tony Horwitz
At the beginning of "Boom," an astonishing investigative journey along the route of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, Tony Horwitz drives a treacherous stretch of Alberta Highway 63, between Edmonton and the oil boomtown of Fort McMurray. The road is known as the Highway of Death, a fitting metaphor for the possible repercussions of extracting oil from the Alberta bitumen, which contains the third-largest reserve in the world, "enough to power North America for decades." But processing bitumen generates up to 23 percent more greenhouse gas than drilled oil; plus there's the danger of transporting it, the likelihood of spills, leaks and ever more accelerated environmental degradation.
Horwitz, whose books include "Confederates in the Attic," explores this Faustian bargain by describing the stretch of obliterated landscape in and around Fort McMurray; so vast it can be seen from space, it "evoked science fiction in which an invasion or asteroid attack has made everything on earth appear alien." He talks to shift workers, managers, boosters, environmentalists, tribal chiefs, bar owners and strip club waitresses all along the pipeline's likely path, from Alberta to Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. "Boom" is the very model of dauntless reporting, lucent prose, memorable portraits of a range of characters, all in a story driven by a moral dilemma with stakes that couldn't possibly be higher.
Rachel Kadish wastes no time setting the plot of her novella, "I Was Here," in motion. "Big, childish, devoted" Charlotte, a day care worker already so fragile and sensitive that she cries at the sight of children's tears, receives a lewd text one day from someone threatening to bring a hellish experience from her past to light. As ever more menacing texts follow, Charlotte worries for her life, and amid her distraction, one of her charges gets injured. Her boss uses the incident as an excuse to fire Charlotte, afraid that the person harassing her might target the day care.
Charlotte's perspective, which dominates the first half of the story, generates a powerful work of psychological realism, an empathic study of a character most writers avoid: passive and victimized. But Kadish also includes other points of view: Charlotte's husband, her boss, a cop, the cop's wife, the person sending the texts and more. These shifts throw the plot into overdrive - people have affairs, knives enter flesh, secrets come into the open - but Charlotte's more nuanced anguish gets lost in the frenzied rush of voices.
By Ethel Rohan
Reading Ethel Rohan's memoir, "Out of Dublin," it's hard not to think of the opening lines of "Angela's Ashes" and Frank McCourt's claim that there's no misery like an Irish Catholic childhood. Rohan and her five siblings grow up with a distant father who tends bar from morning until late at night and drinks his fill, and a volatile mother who suffers from depression and paranoia. Her psychosis grows so severe that she has to be institutionalized, then spends the last 30 years of her life "caged in an armchair by blindness, madness, medication, alcohol and, finally, Alzheimer's."
Despite all this and other terrors, including sexual abuse by a family friend, Rohan can't help but love her parents. She goes out of her way to make her mother "feel needed," and "would have donated [her] organs to please [her father]." The writing is graceful and achieves sentiment without sentimentality. Some of the most striking sections are when Rohan (who now lives in San Francisco) says goodbye to her parents, who die within three months of each other, and when she writes to her mother in the second person, apologizing for missed connections and minor transgressions. Yes, it's a wonder she survived her childhood, more so that she could look back with such forgiveness.
By Hari Kunzru
During his first six months in New York City in 2008, the novelist Hari Kunzru kept a diary of impressions, which he has now integrated into an evocative multimedia essay, "Twice Upon a Time." This innovative piece allows readers to scroll through slides of text and imagery, each one synced to a soundtrack. The text is, by turns, a sketchbook, a meditation on urban life, a work of cultural criticism, and a tribute to a blind, eccentric street performer and composer named Moondog, who became a legend of avant-garde music during the 1950s and '60s for his "snaketime" rhythms and talent for echoing New York street life.
Though he died in 1999, Moondog serves as Kunzru's collaborator in "Twice Upon a Time": His recordings provide a backdrop for the words, lending further atmosphere. Kunzru also includes his own recent street recordings - of traffic noise, chattering voices, subway percussionists - which provide another layer of sonic "archaeology." The combined effect allows readers not only to experience New York from anywhere but also to feel the reverberations of its rich and varied history.
Porter Shreve's fourth novel, "The End of the Book," was published in February. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org