Susan Casey, The Wave ***

The Wave is a surfing book disguised as a popular science book about giant waves. In her introduction, Casey says she'll investigate "freak" waves from the point of view of scientists, mariners, and surfers. And she does, but with a heavy emphasis on surfers. Most of the chapters describe awesome days out surfing with Laird Hamilton, the literary equivalent of a Warren Miller film or Endless Summer.

Casey is a very good writer, effectively capturing both the sense of an experience and scientific principles. I just wish she'd provided more of the latter.

Felix Markham, Napoleon ***

One encounters Napoleon Bonaparte in many different places. He is the villain in War and Peace, the background villain in the Patrick O'Brien Jack Aubrey novels, the self-satisfied emperor in the huge J.L. David painting at the Louvre. He fought the Turks when he occupied Egypt. He was exiled to the island of Elba, or was it St Helena? Trafalgar, Waterloo, Austerlitz, Josephine. How do all of these glimpses fit together? And how does the Napoleonic era relate to the French Revolution? I wanted to read a biography to find out, especially after our recent trip to Paris.

At 300 pages, Markham's biography is necessarily short for such an eventful life. It gave me what I wanted, although it did have plenty of exhausting paragraphs that were little more than lists of battles or political machinations. It felt well balanced in its opinions and was not without interesting insights, but it couldn't really give a sense of Napoleon as a person. Quite an amazing life, for sure.

Richard S. Wheeler, Snowbound ***

Snowbound tells a fictionalized version of John Fremont's fourth expedition, which sought a railway route across the Rockies at the 38th parallel... in winter. The expedition met with disaster, largely because Fremont interpreted all warning signs as merely impediments that would make his destiny more impressive.

At the heart of the story is the contradictory character of Fremont, "a man of considerable courage and ability who nevertheless was constantly getting into grave trouble, often from lack of judgment." Fremont inspired loyalty among his men; various of the narrators in Snowbound note with perplexity the blind obedience they all had to his obviously flawed decisions.

The first half of the story, leading the crew into disaster, has a certain repetitiveness to it: they should turn back, Fremont obstinately insists on continuing, mules die, the expedition members wonder why they don't speak up. Also, the various expedition members who narrate the story don't have distinctive voices, lending a sameness to their observations. I also felt a lack of sympathy, since the character's choices were so obviously wrong and so reversible. The drama was significantly more involving once their situation became apparently hopeless.

Fremont is an intriguing character, and I can imagine tracking down some of Wheeler's primary sources in the future,

Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs **** 1/2

These two excellent adventure/travel books describe the post-WWII years that Thesiger spent among the Bedu of southern Arabia and the Madan of southern Iraq respectively. The books give a strong sense of place, both the natural landscape and the culture of the people in these harsh environments. Arabian Sands in particular captures the diversity of the land that might seem at first like undifferentiated desert sands.

Thesiger has a talent for finding the telling detail that paints a picture and allows him to make a general point without interrupting the flow of the narrative. He has an obvious respect for the people and their way of life. In the course of his story he shows how the customs of the tribes fit into an ecosystem of mutually supporting cultures; in a later chapter of The Marsh Arabs, he makes a compelling case for the advantages of traditional ways of life over the apparently less burdensome modern life, including the double-edged sword of education.

These two books will forever color my mental picture of that part of the word.

Max McCoy, Damnation Road ** 1/2

This paperback Western starts out promisingly, in medias res, with a bleeding outlaw walking into a general store to buy ammunition. The author's strength is his action scenes, and he wisely starts with a long one. The author's weakness is his inability to build any narrative momentum. There's no urgency between the action set pieces, no sense of what the protagonist's goal is or what's driving his actions. As a result, the book feels very episodic, like a collection of stories instead of a novel. The plot developments described on the back cover don't start until half way through the book, and they sound more cohesive in summary than they do on the page.

Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire ***

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but the cover of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever includes a quote on the back cover that sums up my experience of reading it:  "By simply putting things in chronological order, Will Hermes shows just how astonishing New York City's music was in the 1970s" (Luc Sante). Combined with the informative subtitle, this recommendation tells you what's good and bad about the book.

On the plus side, Hermes covers all of the various types of music that were vital in NYC from 1973 to 1977: rock, salsa, disco, rap, jazz, and classical. The down side is encapsulated in the word "simply" in the quote from Luc Sante: Hermes doesn't provide much insight into the musical innovations that were happening, nor into any cross-pollination between the styles. He pretty much records the facts in chronological order, and counts on us to say, "isn't it amazing that all of this was happening at the same time?"

I also think the subtitle is hyperbolic. While it's certainly true that a lot of classic music came out of this place and time (from Born to Run to Saturday Night Fever to Einstein on the Beach), I think only the first stirrings of rap/hip-hop qualify as "changing music forever." And one last skeptical question: couldn't you make similar arguments for, say, San Francisco in the 1960s or Memphis in the 1950s?

My favorite parts of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire turned out to be the personal recollections of the author, who was an outer-borough teenager at the time. His memories were vivid interludes between the sometimes gossipy descriptions of Phillip Glass meeting Lou Reed and the famous people who attended the Talking Heads' first headlining gig.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King *** 1/2

The Pale King is an unfinished novel that David Foster Wallace left when he died. It takes place at an IRS processing center in Peoria in 1985. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it revolves around the IRS processing in 1985, because many of the chapters describe prior events in the lives of the characters who eventually work there. The major theme of the book is boredom: how people deal with it and how central it is to life in the modern bureaucratic world.

Few ordinary Americans know anything...about the deep changes the Service underwent in the mid-1980s, changes that today directly affect the way citizens' tax obligations are determined and enforced. And the reason for this public ignorance is not secrecy.... The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes, and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this feature... The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a more effective shield than is secrecy. (Chapter 9)

It's important to read The Pale King as a collection of drafts and fragments rather than as a completed novel. For one thing, the book is all setup and no narrative payoff — although in the preface the editor suggests that DFW might have intended the final book to be like that too. Some of the extant chapters are impressive, and you can see where the author was headed. I think you have to be a DFW fan to appreciate the insights into how he worked, but if you are a DFW fan it's definitely worthwhile.