This spirited jaunt into the peaks of Europe may inspire readers to pack their bags.
A tour through the Alps reveals history, geology, anthropology, and local customs.
As he frequently remarks, journalist and travel writer O’Shea (The Friar of Carcassonne: Revolt Against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars, 2011, etc.) is afraid of heights. Nevertheless, he decided to brave breathtakingly steep inclines and hairpin turns to investigate the dramatic political and cultural history of the French, German, Austrian, and Italian Alps. Traveling west to east, O’Shea drove a “souped-up” Renault Mégane Sport, a “muscle car” distinctive enough to attract attention in Geneva, where he began his journey. The French Alps, he notes, gave birth to Romanticism: Rousseau (“Switzerland’s most famous son”) set his sensational novel about Abelard and Heloise along the shores of Lake Geneva, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein there. Besides abundant literary references throughout his ebullient narrative, the author traces the mountains’ role in war and conquest: Hannibal, Napoleon, and Hitler all make appearances. In Garmisch-Partenkirchen, he visited a museum documenting the Nazi-dominated Winter Olympics of 1936. He also chronicles his visit to Heidiland, a cheesy theme park cashing in on the popularity of Joanna Spyri’s children’s book; discovers that the famed Saint Bernard rescue dogs did not carry kegs of brandy; relates famous mountaineers’ “heart-stopping tales of danger courted and overcome”; and offers chilling descriptions of the “arduous and sinuous” routes he traversed. After being shrouded by fog, he saw “a horrific vista of yawning emptiness”; sheer cliffs and looming mountains “stretch to the heavens, gray rock and white snow in a stirring melodrama of nature.” He stopped in quaint villages, where he ate local specialties, all recounted in detail. O’Shea occasionally punctuates his otherwise brisk narrative with jarring imagery: he sees the Matterhorn “sheathed in clouds, like a burlesque dancer teasing the tourists staring up at it”; and he insists on describing bikers in reference to national cuisine: “a bratwurst of German bikers,” “a soufflé” of French.
This spirited jaunt into the peaks of Europe may inspire readers to pack their bags.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24685-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
HISTORY | NATURE | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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