Book Reviews

I See You've Called in Dead

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Do-It-Yourself Obituary

Bud Stanley writes obituaries for a living. Forty-four, divorced and adrift, he’s living his life on automatic, coasting along without aim or purpose. The book opens with a work colleague setting Bud up on a blind date. The woman arrives. She’s attractive, smart, personable—and accompanied by her ex-boyfriend with whom she’s just reconciled. The date is not a great success.

Returning home, Bud begins drinking, and “in the muddled, whiskey-soaked place where terrible ideas pose as good ones,” he starts writing his own obituary: Bud Stanley, the first man to perform open-heart surgery on himself, died today in a hot-air balloon accident…Stanley was married anywhere from four to nine times. His ex-wives, all friends, praised his unique lovemaking technique, one they said could last upward to twenty-eight seconds. The obituary adds that he was a member of the Jamaican Bobsled Team, ninth in line to the British throne, and the inventor of toothpaste…You get the idea. This drunken exercise would have been innocent, good fun, had Bud not accidentally uploaded his obituary into the wire service system.

The next morning, he is promptly placed on leave, an administrative step prior to being fired. Howard, his boss, mentor and friend, tells him, “I don’t think anything matters to you anymore, Bud. And that kind of breaks my heart…You are an obituary writer who does not understand the first thing about life.” Reading this modern urban tale, I kept hearing the Beatles circa 1965: He's a real nowhere man/ Sitting in his nowhere land/ Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

In a scene mirroring the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), Bud learns he can’t be fired because the system now has him listed as deceased.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little confused. I’m not dead.”…

“For all intents and purposes, you are dead to the company. Which is why you have rights.”

“But if I were alive?”

“You’d be fired and we would end your COBRA due to negligence on your part.”

“So I’m better off dead?”

“Certainly in terms of health and dental, yes.”

I See You’ve Called in Dead begins as a funny, breezy beach read, but as Bud starts taking stock of his “nowhere life,” the story expands emotionally, prompting readers to examine how we live our own lives—or don’t. Through a series of incidents, he begins to understand that the measure of a life is not in the quantity of its years but in the quality of its moments. Or as the Stoic philosopher Seneca expressed it: Life, if lived well, is long enough. By the end, Bud is writing a very different obituary for himself.

Warning: Amid the many laughs, there will be tears.

What would you write if you had to write your obituary? Today, right now. What comes to mind? What memories, days, moments? What people and experiences? I realize, at first glance, that the idea of writing one’s own obituary while still alive may sound morbid. It’s not, though. I promise you. It’s a needed reminder of who you are, of what truly matters. Because it’s your life and there’s still time to write it. Before I have to.

from I See You’ve Called in Dead

John Kenney

Zibby Publishing

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (May 15, 2025.) Reprinted with permission.

Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

Poetics of the profound

At the beginning of the 19^th century and well into the Industrial Revolution, William Wordsworth wrote: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Wordsworth’s sonnet was both a lament and a warning: With the benefits of science has come “disenchantment.” We have outgrown the old mythologies with their gods and spirits. But we have lost a sense of the sacred and our connection to it. This is the theme of Cosmic Connections by esteemed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.

For Taylor, poetry is much more than pretty words. It can point to a profoundly different way of perceiving the universe and our place in it (“What does poetry do? It begins to transform our experience.”)

Ancient cultures viewed the cosmos as a meaningful and interconnected whole. However, with Newton and the Scientific Revolution, there came a perceptual shift. The universe was now understood as a machine governed by natural laws. This mechanistic view understood the cosmos as a vast, impersonal system of forces, waves and particles, and eliminated the kind of spiritual connection that once gave meaning and purpose to human lives. “God is dead,” claimed the German philosopher Nietzsche.

Over the past 500 years, human life has become radically redefined through the advance of science, especially with our understanding of time (“late and soon”) and the rise in material acquisition (“Getting and spending”). But, he argues, it has also diminished people’s lives (“We have given our hearts away.”) Nature, which we once felt ourselves part of, has become “natural resources,” objects and things to be exploited, extracted, used. Our material benefit has also been our spiritual loss (“A sordid boon!”)

Primarily focusing on the Romantic poets Hölderlin and Novalis in Germany, Wordsworth and Keats in England, and post-Romantic poets such as Rilke, Baudelaire, Hopkins, Mallarmè, and Eliot, Taylor attempts to show how their poetry stretched the limits of language, suggesting a different quality of consciousness that enables us to see the world in new and profound ways.

This is not an easy book to read. Charles Taylor is an esteemed academic, so, not surprising, he writes in academese. Which is a shame because his thoughts and ideas are insightful, even transformative, calling for a new sense of cosmic connection, one that combines the insights of science with a more holistic, spiritual perspective that can restore a sense of wonder, meaning and purpose to our lives.

The book is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection; by “connection” I mean not just awareness of the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration. My hypothesis is that the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history, but that the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history.

from Cosmic Connections

Charles Taylor

Belknap Press

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (April 15, 2025.) Reprinted with permission.

Big Jim and the White Boy

Re-inventing Huckleberry Finn. Again.

This graphic novel reminded me of the pleasure I once enjoyed reading Classics Illustrated comics as a child: the bright colors, the vivid drawings, the story flowing from one panel to the next in a cavalcade of images, they all fed my young imagination. It’s how I first “read” The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, and other classics.

The book industry officially recognized graphic novels as a unique genre in 2001, and ever since then they have become increasingly popular, particularly with younger readers. Over the years, they have continued to gain visibility and legitimacy as an art form, especially after 1992, when Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the holocaust, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Though primarily a visual art form, the graphic novel can convey narrative, nuance, and insight. This is certainly the case with Big Jim and the White Boy, a re-imagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It joins other recent retellings, or extensions, of Mark Twain’s classic, like Robert Coover’s Huck Out West (2017), where Huck as a young man witnesses the “winning” of the West—the gold rushes, the homesteaders, the Indian wars, the massacres—that was a formative chapter in this nation’s history; or like last year’s National Book Award-winning James (2024) by Percival Everett, retelling Twain’s tale from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim.

This story is set in three distinct time periods: the turbulent 1850s and ‘60s leading up to and including the Civil War; and then 1932, when Jim and Huck are old men, lifelong friends recounting, and often humorously correcting, each other’s memories of their past; and then in contemporary times, when a descendant of Jim’s is teaching a university course on Huckleberry Finn.

This imaginative story framework allows the creative team of David Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson to show the reality of slavery in mid-19th century America, telling stories of the Underground Railroad, of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and of the eventual war itself. It also allows them to provide background on Twain’s 1885 book, including the actual people on whom the characters of Huck and Jim were based.

Each age rediscovers and, to some extent, re-invents the past. Big Jim and the White Boy uses the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to deepen, expand, and enrich our understanding of the American past that produced this classic work.

Click image to enlarge — Click on the image to enlarge!

David F. Walker and
Marcus Kwame Anderson

Ten Speed Graphic

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (March 15, 2025.) Reprinted with permission.

Playground

A novel for our time.

People read novels for different reasons. Probably most read for a good story. We read some novels for the beauty of their language (Think Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead) or to learn something new, or experience vicariously what we would never experience in our own lives. We also read novels to expand our world. It’s rare to find one novel that can do all this, but Richard Powers’ amazing Playground does just that, and more.

Author of the 2018 Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory, Powers tells interlocking stories of four people over a half century. Todd Keane is on the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence (“I was helping to build the next big way of being.”) He shares a close and competitive relationship with best friend Rafi Young, for whom life is decanted through literature. Both are in love with Ina Aroita, who finds her meaning through art. Meanwhile, ninety-something Evie Beaulieu, whose father developed the first aqualung, has found life most fulfilling in the ocean. Together, these characters’ lives embody the novel’s main themes.

Powers’ story is as capacious as the Pacific which Evie spends her life exploring. Through his exquisite prose, we share her exhilaration in the watery underworld, amid its abundant life. He makes an argument that our planet should be called Ocean rather than Earth. (“Ninety percent of the biosphere is underwater!”) We terrestrials are in the minority.

Through Evie’s eyes, too, we see the continuing degradation of the planet and the impact of the resulting climate change. In 1896, “the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing how rising carbon dioxide levels would soon cook the planet’s atmosphere.” 1896? We can’t say we weren’t warned.

Along with environmental concerns, Powers brings us into the world of today’s “techno-utopians,” showing both AI’s promise and its peril. (“We were putting the future on autopilot.”)

Powers, a computer scientist by training, displays a vast encyclopedic grasp of the latest technology, of the natural and social sciences, of philosophy, history, globalization, yet he is also capable of conveying moments of transcendent vision, filled with awe and wonder. (“Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.”)

This is a book for our time. In a nutshell, it’s about “machine intelligence and human ignorance.”

He offers no easy answers. Facing the challenge of planetary catastrophe, one longs for hope, even amid the growing truth of the biosphere’s slow killing. Like Evie, we may find that “hope and truth could not be reconciled.”

The earth is 4 billion years old. Homo sapiens has been around only 300,000. Taking the long view, there may be hope for life on earth. It just might not include humanity.

Halfway through the twentieth century, in a cold northern city on the other side of the globe from Makatea, a father threw his weighted-down twelve-year-old daughter into the water, hoping she would sink to the bottom. Forty pounds of metal pulled the girl downward. Twisting in animal dread, she looked from the world she’d fallen into back up into the world she came from. Through the shimmering layer in between, the girl saw the quicksilver outline of her father stabbing a finger toward his own face and mouthing, Tu n’as qu’à respire. All you need to do is breathe.

from Playground

Richard Powers

W.W. Norton & Co.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (February 15, 2025.) Reprinted with permission.

The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster

Bigfoot and his followers

In preparation for this month’s sQuatch Fest at the Cowlitz County Expo Center, you might bone up on the legend and lore of the big, hairy guy with this recent (2024) book by John O’Connor, which offers “the secret history” of Bigfoot—as against, what, the standard, well-known history? (One suspects the influence of a marketing department.)

O’Connor began by reading Robert Michael Pyle’s 1995 Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, judging it “far and away the most literate of the Bigfoot literature.” “It was the first book I’d read during my research, which was probably a mistake, as it seemed to have said it all.” (We’ll return to this point.) O’Connor starts his own exploration by visiting the sage of Grays River, finding the good gray poet-naturalist to be a delightful, entertaining raconteur.

From Grays River, O’Connor begins a wide-ranging trek that takes him to Maine, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, northern California, as well as familiar parts of the Pacific Northwest.

He recounts the first documented Bigfoot sighting, called “the Barrington Beast,” in colonial Massachusetts in 1765, and follows the many later sightings of “wild men,” including Native American legends of the mythical being. He revisits well-known accounts—Fred Beck’s tale of the creatures attacking a cabin-full of Skamania miners in 1924, and the famous Patterson/Gimlin film from 1967.

His field notes go far afield, discussing delusions, mass hallucinations, the enduring attraction of pseudoscience, the flexibility, malleability, and fallibility of memory; cryptozoology (the study of legendary, unknown, or extinct animals), as well as individuals like Peter Matthiessen, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Donald Trump (he’s not a fan), and devotes an entire chapter to the ivory-billed woodpecker (once thought extinct) that seems a long and puzzling detour.

As intriguing, colorful, and controversial as Bigfoot himself are the “Bigfooters,” who comprise a fascinating sub-culture of believers. He brings a skeptical, though generally open mind to the stories and the people who tell them.

Carl Sagan notably threw down the challenge that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Unfortunately, in our current age of alternative facts and FAKE NEWS, “evidence” is pretty much in the eye of the believer, or non-believer.

For a “secret history,” there is not much that’s new here, though O’Connor is an enjoyable and humorous companion. But if you’re going to read only one book on Sasquatch & Co., it’s still best to stay with Bob Pyle’s—at least until truly extraordinary evidence turns up.

Some Bigfooters, like devout Trumpists, hard-core wokesters, and religious fanatics, have a way of spinning belief into an ever-widening web that entangles and devours everything in its path. But we all do this on some level: bend reality to be what we want it to be. We interpret events based on our convictions rather than on evidence, leap from rational to nonrational assumptions when it suits us, especially when we’re protecting our pet ideas, and cling to false beliefs in the face of facts. Another way of putting it is our brains aren’t great at discerning the truth. They’re good at telling stories, stories that attempt to resolve or give context to our uncertainty, fear, and confusion, stories we want to believe are true.

from The Secret History of Bigfoot

John O’Connor

Sourcebooks

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (January 15, 2025.) Reprinted with permission.

Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs

Turns out the “kooks” were right

We here at the Pentagon would like to clarify our denials of the past seventy years regarding Unidentified Flying Objects. We staunchly maintain that UFOs do not exist, but, ahem, well, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) do. We apologize for any confusion.

For more than a half century, UFOs have been the Pentagon’s best kept non-secret. They have debunked and dismissed hundreds of credible sightings and discredited witnesses as kooks or frauds or crazy. What’s surprising is that it was done so brazenly. Over two weekends in 1952, multiple UAP were seen in Washington DC, including over the White House. They were viewed by hundreds of eyewitnesses and appeared on the front pages of major newspapers. Air Force pilots pursued and even fired at them. A thorough investigation found that it was “flocks of birds.”

In March 1966, Michigan neighborhoods saw multiple strange craft over several days that “dove, hovered, climbed, and disappeared—only to reappear.” Government investigators announced it was “swamp gas.”

Oh, and that Roswell incident in 1947? Turns out there was a crash, and bodies were recovered. So, it wasn’t “weather balloons” as the Army reported (Our bad!) Even during World War II, Allied and Axis pilots reported mysterious “orbs of light” around and in their craft so regularly that they were nicknamed “foo fighters.”

You mean they’re real? was Luis Elizondo’s first reaction when he became head of

the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2010. Prior to this position, he had overseen counterespionage and counterterrorism investigations for the Department of Defense and worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. You’d think someone would have told him.

Imminent recounts Elizondo’s efforts to uncover and then reveal the extent of UAP encounters, not so he could finally get on "Oprah," but from his concern for national security. He fears we may be “playing checkers against an enemy who (has) already mastered three-dimensional chess.” The technology—and the physics behind such extraordinary technology—is far beyond anything we possess or even fully comprehend.

And his concern seems legitimate: There are multiple reports of UAP hovering over US nuclear missile silos. And not just hovering. In March 1967, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, its intercontinental ballistic missiles “went offline, one after another.” Even more disturbing, similar UAP appeared over a Soviet missile base in Ukraine in 1982, where the launch sequence switched on (!) without any humans entering the launch codes.

He notes that each time a nuclear reactor has melted down (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) UAP have been witnessed in the areas for days or months afterward, even calling nuclear reactors “UAP magnets.”

In the 21st century, it has become harder to deny UAP. In November 2004, the US Navy’s Nimitz Carrier Strike Group encountered a number of objects descending from high altitudes, hovering, then zipping away at theoretically impossible speeds. Over several days, these egg-shaped, noiseless vehicles were “seen by six naval aviators, tracked by multiple radars on multiple platforms, and videotaped by an advanced military infrared targeting system.” Swamp gas did not seem likely. (You can watch the government’s declassified UFO videos on YouTube.)

Other nations have been more forthcoming in investigating and publicly acknowledging these encounters. For example, between 1977-1978, the Brazilian military compiled more than 3500 case files on UAP in their northern Colares region.

Largely by the efforts of Elizondo and courageous colleagues, the truth about the frequency and nature of these encounters has become public. He openly admits, “You might be thinking this all sounds crazy. I’m not saying it doesn’t sound crazy. I’m saying that it’s real.”

We are left with the puzzling mystery that first prompted his concerns: We know that they are. We just don’t know what they are. Are they extraterrestrial? Extradimensional? Intelligent beings from the future?

The implications are immense and profound. In a foreword to the book, Christopher Mellon, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, writes that these revelations “may soon cause humanity to reframe its view of itself and our place in the cosmos.” We may be on the cusp of a paradigm shift unlike any other in human history. And it may be imminent.

Stay tuned.

At the dawn of the nuclear age, UAP started appearing in greater numbers—and sometimes they crashed. Roswell was one of those incidents. A UAP fell that day in the vicinity of a government test facility in New Mexico and broke into two crash sites. At first, government investigators assumed that the Roswell craft were from another nation, possibly some sort of reconnaissance mission gone awry. But within hours, the US Army realized the truth, that these craft were not made by humans.

from Imminent

Luis Elizondo

William Morrow

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (November 25, 2024.) Reprinted with permission.

The Reformatory

Horrors of both supernatural and natural kinds.

In 1950, 12-year-old Robert Stephens, Jr., fights off a teenage boy who is making aggressive sexual advances on Robert’s sister. Robert is black, the older boy is white and the son of a prominent citizen in the Jim Crow south. You know immediately it’s not going to go well for Robert. He’s sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory notorious for its brutality and from where some boys never return. This is where the horror begins.

Robbie enters the cruel system, quickly learning rules for survival from his friends Blue and Redbone—how to not-see what they witness, how to avoid the sadistic Warden Haddock—and adopts the dread the boys feel at being sent to the “Fun House.”

What adds to the horror is that this reformatory is based on the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, operated by the state of Florida from January 1900 to June 2011. Hundreds of men have testified to the cruelty, gruesome beatings, and rape they suffered while youths at the school, often sent there for minor offenses or for the crime of being orphans. In recent years, researchers from the University of Florida have found the remains of at least 55 boys buried on the grounds.

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) is also based on the Dozier School, a tense, gritty novel with a jaw-dropping twist at the end. Tananarive Due is a major writer of Black horror and speculative fiction, author of such works as The Between (1995), The Good House (2003), and The Living Blood (2001), which won the American Book Award, and she adds a supernatural element to the “natural” horrors of the school: Robbie is able to see the ghosts, or haints, of the boys who died there, and through them, he learns the full extent of the horrors that have been committed, and why many boys have gone missing. Their spirits are now seeking revenge for the injustices that were their lives.

For readers, supernatural horror is easier to live with. We can put the book down when finished, knowing it’s fiction. It’s much more discomforting when realizing the horror actually happened.

Both Colson’s and Due’s novels are riveting and disturbing mirrors to the racial injustice that is part of our nation’s history. But for Due, there is also a more personal connection. The Reformatory is dedicated to her great uncle, Robert Stephens, who was killed at the Dozier School for Boys in 1937. He was 15 years old.

“Don’t b’lieve in ‘evil’ in most ways,” Miz Lottie said. “I believe in the devil, all right, but man don’t need no help from Satan to do what folks call ‘evil.’ Man do evil ev’ry day and call it doin’ their job. Slave drivers was ‘doin’ their job,’ beatin’ the skin off folks… ’Cuz, see, colored folks fighting for what’s theirs is like a virus to white folks—and they kill a virus so it don’t spread. That killing is the work of man, not the devil.”

from The Reformatory

Tananarive Due

Saga Press

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (October 15, 2024.) Reprinted with permission.

The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur

But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled on into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends. Till the last day, and maybe not even then. Who knows what stories they tell in Heaven.

from The Bright Sword

Lev Grossman

Viking

The God of the Woods

"Do you ever worry that being born into money has stunted us?"

Alice blanched.

I don't mean anything by it," said Delphine. "It's just - lately I've been wondering whether having all of our material needs met from birth has been a positive aspect of our lives. It seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us. The quest, I like to call it. When one's parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?"

From God of the Woods

Liz Moore

Riverhead Books

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

His officers were noticing subtle shifts in his mood and command style. He had become erratic, and at times tyrannical. Cook was known as humane and reasonable. But increasingly, he, too, began to dole out the lashes, the bread and-water treatment, and other punishments. As he headed into the southern hemisphere once again, it appeared to some that Cook’s judgment — and his legendary equanimity — had begun to falter […] It was as though the strains and stresses of the previous voyage were finally catching up with Cook. This was certainly true of his vessel, for the Resolution was revealing her many cracks and flaws. She was, wrote one Cook scholar, a “tired ship, commanded by a tired man.”
–from The Wide Wide Sea

Book Reviews

I See You've Called in Dead