Fall 2006 Editors' Picks

Kenyan-born Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai, who has effected social change throughout Africa, studied in the United States as a young woman. Marcus Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia but raised in Sweden, eventually becoming a celebrated New York chef. Locke biographer Roger Woolhouse is British, novelist John Connolly is Irish, and journalist J.M. Ledgard is Scottish, though he sets his forthcoming debut novel in 1970s Czechoslovakia and currently reports for the Economist from Africa. And though pianist Hélène Grimaud was born in Provence, she currently lives in New York State—making music with four boisterous wolves. But wherever they come from and wherever they set their works, the authors of this year's editors' picks have one thing in common: they deliver splendid writing that makes us rethink our world.

Sometime in the 1990s, in a scant few lines in a Czech newspaper, a television cameraman who had previously defected recalled that in 1975 the secret police had appropriated his footage of a giraffe being born and had subsequently slaughtered the entire herd. Reading those lines, J.M. Ledgard, then the Economist's Prague-based foreign correspondent for Eastern Europe, immediately recognized a revelatory story and set out to research it—never mind the lack of official witnesses or a paper trail. The result was not, however, straightforward reportage but a harrowing and unearthly debut novel, Giraffe (LJ 8/06), that slides reflection on vision and memory, the sorrow of capture, and the need for home into an affecting account of nearly 50 beautiful creatures and the people they touched before their death.

Why fiction? “I'm happy being a foreign correspondent, but I always knew my sensibility was more literary,” explains Ledgard in a phone call from Somalia, where he has been covering the fighting for the Economist. More significantly, he wanted to explore feelings that journalists don't usually confront and questions that don't have obvious answers, questions of “captivity and suffering and the otherness of animals, this strangeness we have around us every day.” Perhaps, notes Ledgard, the deaths he depicts don't loom as large as the devastation wrought by, say, the Gulag, but by “meditating on one suffering we are more open to understanding suffering on another level.” In a world saturated with violence, especially the mythologized variety, Ledgard wants us to look suffering in the face.

To reimagine 1970s Czechoslovakia, a place gray with resignation in an era that Ledgard sees generally as having “not that many markers,” the author read prodigiously and talked to anyone he could buttonhole. In one exchange, Czech president Vaclav Havel mused that after the Prague spring, Czechoslovakia was a nation asleep, “and with all the hundreds of interviews that's what described it to me,” says Ledgard. In the novel, the sensitive young Amina signals her distress with “the Communist moment” by literally stumbling about as a sleepwalker, suggesting both the despair of a people who had lost their collective memory to Soviet dominance and our need generally, given the numbing effect of the modern condition, simply to wake up.

Watchtowers of the grasslands, the far-seeing creatures that other animals gather around to catch any sign of unease, giraffes would seem emblematically to be awake. That may have been their downfall. In the novel, when the secret police necklace a small-town zoo, telling everyone involved that “this night has never happened,” the giraffes are evidently being exterminated because they carry a contagion seen as a threat to national security. The contagion of freedom, perhaps? Expert at nailing doublespeak—the giraffes drug in from Africa are said to be migrating and, in a send-up of Socialist engineering, will constitute a new subspecies—Ledgard finally turns tables on the regime, using its own language to reveal the horrific consequences of extreme politics in any form. Yet he does not judge his characters, and his giraffes remain captured but uncapturable in their lofty dignity, “the opposite end of anthropomorphism from Mickey Mouse,” as he surmises correctly. Ultimately, Ledgard leaves us pondering but imbued with a powerful desire to remain engaged—like any good novelist, serving as a watchtower of our culture.—Barbara Hoffert

Locke: A Biography by Roger Woolhouse
Cambridge Univ. Dec. ISBN 0-521-81786-2 [ISBN 978-0-521-81786-8]. $40.

“We [Americans] are sometimes faulted for a naïve faith that liberty can change the world. If that's an error it began with reading too much John Locke….” So spoke President Bush in 2003. Those who see our political origins in the work of the supremely rational John Locke might be surprised to hear him cited by a man of the Religious Right, which believes that the United States was founded on Christian principles. The truth is rarely so clear-cut, as Locke's new biographer, Roger Woolhouse (philosophy, emeritus, Univ. of York; Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), reminded LJ in a transatlantic email conversation. Locke thought that “the authority of a government came from God—not…as of divine right—but mediated by the consent of the governed. A political theory which didn't have God in it wouldn't be authentically Lockean,” argues Woolhouse.

Analyses of his writings have abounded, but the last biography (Maurice Cranston's John Locke: A Biography) came out when Locke would have been 325. Now that he is 374, we may meet him in full again, this lean, asthmatic scientist, physician and philosopher, loving friend, and devoted teacher, who sought the tributaries of human knowledge and defended religious toleration. After years mining Locke's words, both published and unpublished, Woolhouse gives us Locke's life and writings woven into an authentic whole. He chose not to interpret Locke according to recent ideas, “which would date within a decade or so,” and sought to “dispel [that] feeling in the air…that Locke is just a dry old bore.... I was wanting to bring out Locke as a person on the basis of his wonderful letters.... I didn't want to intervene too much—not because I was afraid of interpreting but just because his own words were far more entertaining.”

The letters of this, yes, “amusing and affable,” complex and fascinating man include many showing his emotionally and intellectually bracing friendships with women, e.g., Elinor Parry and Damaris Cudworth, the latter a philosopher in her own right. Locke's provocative relationship with Parry faded, but Locke, who never married, was to end his days on the family estate of Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham, to which he repaired after a five-year exile in Holland in the 1680s. Woolhouse reminds us that had Locke, near 60, not survived the treacherous winter sea journey from Holland back to England, we would not know An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises of Government, and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Now we can be thankful not only for the life and works of this profoundly influential man but for Woolhouse's gift of him to us anew.—Margaret Heilbrun

Wild Harmonies by Hélène Gimaud
Riverhead: Putnam. Sept. tr. from French by Ellen Hinsey. ISBN 1-59448-927-0. $24.95.

From the moment she slashed her heel on a cracked bit of Corsican glass one childhood summer, experiencing what she recalls in the startling and original Wild Harmonies (LJ 8/06) as a “delicious pain [that] made me exist more,” life for French pianist Hélène Grimaud has been a series of awakenings. First, of course, was the momentous awakening to music, an unfolding of the universe that carried her from lessons in her native Aix-en-Provence to Paris's Conservatoire National to an international career as a musician of distinctive and often roiling sensibilities. Just as important, after she had decided to live in the less tradition-bound United States, was her encounter with a wolf.

The wolf was owned by a neighbor, and as it sidled its head under her hand and then trustingly rolled over to reveal its belly, Grimaud had an urgent sense of recognition that changed her life completely. “It's impossible to say exactly what happened,” she confides to LJ in a telephone interview from her tour in Germany. “But it was definitely an intuition, faintly sensing rather than seeing something that was already there.”

With the burning enthusiasm she had previously reserved for music, Grimaud threw herself into the study of wolves, securing certification to act as a conservator and initially thinking she would establish some kind of sanctuary. But she soon came to see that “as with music, there is no hope of conservation without education” and instead opted to create a learning center that would acquaint people with the unspeakably beautiful—and unspeakably threatened—Canis lupus. Now, four “ambassador wolves” at Grimaud's Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, NY, regularly meet and greet visitors, and a magnificent white Arctic male named Atka enjoys field trips that include libraries. These visits have been among Grimaud's favorites, as “the people at library events are already so knowledgeable about conservation issues that you can talk to them on a high level.”

Grimaud's involvement with wolves has changed not just her playing but, more significantly, her attitude toward it. Her wolves are a huge responsibility grounding her daily, and she has come to feel that same responsibility toward music: “Before, music was a passion; now it's a cause.” With the English translation of her French best seller, she is furthering her extraordinary commitment. Grimaud was inspired to write by a journalist friend who had joined a publishing house and asked if she kept a diary.

He saw possibilities in the abstract scraps she had been scribbling down since adolescence, but Grimaud rejected straightforward autobiography for meditation, blending fact, memoir, and reflection in a light-footed narrative that carries out her belief in the underlying connections among ideas. Thus, her terror upon hearing her first CD—meant as “a weapon in love”—gives way to a discussion revealing that the Greeks associated music with archery. Grimaud herself is no stranger to the bow. As a performer, wolf advocate, and now author, she keeps shooting arrows straight at our hearts.—Barbara Hoffert

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Atria: S. & S. Nov. ISBN 0-7432-9885-3. $22.

In 1999, Irish journalist John Connolly took the crime fiction world by storm with his Shamus Award–winning debut, Every Dead Thing, which featured ex-cop Charlie “Bird” Parker. He followed up with four more Charlie Parker novels and a standalone thriller, Bad Men, but the forthcoming The Book of Lost Things (see review, p. 135) may surprise fans expecting the same gritty underworld of sadistic villains and psychopaths. This eerily beautiful coming-of-age tale follows 12-year-old David as grief for his dead mother propels him into a strange land populated by fairy tale heroes and mythical monsters.

At first glance, this new work represents a change from your Charlie Parker novels, yet those books contained supernatural elements. Is The Book of Lost Things a continuation of those interests?

Themes of grief, loss, and redemption have been present in my previous novels; in some sense, the new book represented an opportunity to explore those themes in a new way. I've used tales within tales as well in the earlier books, and there are strong fairy-tale elements in Dark Hollow and to a lesser extent in Every Dead Thing, so The Book of Lost Things is less of a radical departure than it first appears. Also, I don't really view this as a fairy tale. David is externalizing his demons in an effort to confront them, and the novel's fantastical elements are very much a product of his imagination. The book can be read literally (which is how some younger readers might take it), but it's clear by the final chapter that something very different is happening.

What writers or fairy tale sources inspired you in writing this novel?

I deliberately didn't go back to Angela Carter or Anne Sexton, both of whom explored those old tales through short stories and poetry, respectively. Instead, I returned to the original tales themselves, particularly the Brothers Grimm. The novel was an attempt to explore different interpretations of these stories by filtering them through David's imagination. His experiences determine the way in which the tales are told, and his grief and anger bring elements to the fore that might only have been hinted at in the original versions.

Fairy tales are often dismissed as just children's stories. What deeper meanings can adults draw from them?

What is wonderful about these stories is that they allow us to draw our own meanings from them. Our responses are colored by our own experiences, by both the children we once were and the adults we have become. I hope that, by empathizing with David, the reader is drawn back into his or her own childhood, but on another level I want the reader to realize that childhood has never entirely gone away. People who lose touch with their childhood make for very poor adults.

What are you working on now? Will you ever write about Ireland in your fiction?

I have almost finished a mystery novel, The Unquiet, that will appear in 2007. And I still have no plans to write about Ireland. I think my imagination would feel very stifled if I were to set a book in my own country. It would be an “Irish book,” instead of simply a “book,” and I like writing “books.”

What is your favorite fairy tale and why?

I do like “Hansel and Gretel”, partly because there are layers of meaning that can be teased out from it, but also because it has such a great hook: a house of candy that lures kids into the clutches of an old hag who eats them. It gives a real frisson of excitement to children because it taps into [their] elemental fears: the fear of abandonment, of being at the mercy of another who means you harm, of being consumed. I get annoyed, though, when these stories are sanitized to remove some of the threats or violence, or when the harsh punishments meted out to wrongdoers are softened. By doing so, we remove much of their impact and make these stories more confusing for children, not less so. Children have a very fine sense of right and wrong, of good and evil. They want evil to be punished and good to be rewarded. By diluting the nature of the evil, we make the good more difficult to understand.

Are you a big reader of fantasies?

I’m not much of a fantasy reader at all, though, and, like I said earlier, I don’t really consider The Book of Lost Things to be a fantasy book in the genre sense. I think it’s clear that David’s world is drawn from fragments of poems, history, myth, stories, even a book of French grammar, all combined together in his imagination to create a realm that is as vivid as anything in the real world, perhaps more so because his future, even his life, is dependent upon the decisions that he makes in that place. One of the quotations I include at the start of the book is from Picasso: Everything you can imagine is real, which I think is just a wonderful way of looking at the world, especially for someone, like me, who is an avid reader. Those who love reading don’t simply ‘read’: they live in the world of their books

What do you want your readers to take from this novel about the power of books and the imagination? Do you think books will retain this power in the face of overwhelming distractions (computers, iPods, video games, the internet, etc)?

People don’t just read books. They are changed by them, altered in a thousand subtle ways. Reading is not a passive pursuit. Only nonreaders look at the act of reading in that way. Those who love books recognize that, by reading, they are opening themselves up to the possibility of transformation, the chance that both they themselves and the world they inhabit may be changed by what they read.

One of my pet hates is encountering people who tell me, with some satisfaction, that they don't read fiction, on the grounds that fiction is somehow less “real” than nonfiction. Yet fiction functions like a prism: it allows us to see experiences that are common to us all refracted through the imagination of another, enabling us to look at the world in an entirely different way, and perhaps to learn something about ourselves that we had either never previously suspected, or which we had simply not been able to put into similar words. Fiction encourages us to empathize by forcing us to inhabit the imagination of another, and through that we come to understand how similar yet how extraordinarily different we all are. It forces us to engage with others, and with the world, in a very intimate, active way. Computers, iPods, video games, even movies will never be able to perform that same function, and as long as people recognize that they will keep returning to books, I hope.

You have one of the best author sites (www.johnconnollybooks.com) that I have seen. I like how you offer a discussion forum where your readers can ask questions and discuss your books. What kind of advice would you give writers who would like to do something similar?

In terms of the site itself I think the writer has to decide what he wants the site to do. If the author simply wants a glorified advertising hoarding [U.K. expression for billboard], then that’s one thing, but if the writer wants visitors and readers to the site to engage with one another, and with the books, that requires regular input from the writer, as well as a willingness to discuss not just his work but books (and culture, for in my experience people who read also tend to be interested in other forms of art and culture) in general. Where the forum is concerned, a good moderator is the key. It's like having a good host or hostess at a party, the kind of person who keeps the conversation flowing, makes sure nobody feels left out, and discourages people from being unkind to one another. My moderator, Jayne, is just superb at that. She makes me look better than I am! —Wilda Williams

Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson
Houghton. Nov. ISBN 0-395-85405-9 [ISBN 978-0-395-85405-1]. $35.

At a London conference in the spring of 1962, a 28-year-old English secretarial school graduate–turned–untrained scientist presented the results of her two years spent studying chimpanzees in the wild. Although Jane Goodall was a protégé of noted paleontologist Louis Leakey, her startling discoveries that chimpanzees use tools and eat meat were dismissed by the conference chair, who advised his colleagues not to be fooled by the presenter's “glamour.” That incident, writes biographer Dale Peterson in Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man, was a forerunner of the prejudice—“her legs were too nice, her hair too blond, her face too fine, her manner too feminine for anything she said or wrote to be taken all that seriously”—that at times has overshadowed Goodall's brilliant scientific career.

This constant trivialization of her accomplishments prompted Peterson in 1995 to begin the first full-length biography of the renowned primatologist. “All the articles I had read were obsessed with Jane's feminine qualities, her good looks, her supposed fragility,” explains the writer in a phone interview. “But not one had said she was a great scientist or had discussed her impact on the field. It was important for me to place Jane in a larger context and write about her as a person who did a great thing.”

The author of several acclaimed works about primates, including Chimpanzee Travels and The Deluge and the Ark, Peterson first met Goodall when she was seeking a cowriter for her 1993 book, Visions of Caliban. For the biography, Goodall generously allowed Peterson full access. “I was incredibly lucky to start when I did. I interviewed Jane's mother, her father, her nanny, her first husband. All of these people are dead now.”

Did the author worry that because of his friendship with Goodall critics would accuse him of penning a hagiography? Goodall never asked to see what he was writing, says Peterson, but he did send her the final manuscript for factual clarification. Still, readers seeking a Kitty Kelly–style tell-all will be disappointed, although Peterson's book does depict an attractive young woman fending off the amorous advances of notorious womanizer Leakey. “She's had her love affairs, her weak moments,” admits Peterson, “but Jane's a remarkable person. The more I got to know her, the more I admired her. I have done my best to write an objective biography within the context of the science.”

Goodall, now in her seventies, travels around the world to lecture on conservation and environmental issues. Her legacy, says Peterson, lies in her science and activism. “Jane changed the standards for what is good research in animal behavior. She broke the code of chimpanzees. That was extraordinary.”—Wilda Williams

Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
Knopf. Nov. ISBN 0-307-26348-7. $24.95.

Political activist. Scientist. Feminist. Nobel Peace Prize winner. Wangari Maathai is all of the above. The Green Belt Movement she founded in 1977 to help restore indigenous forests has since spread from Kenya across Africa, while her courage to stand up and speak out against injustice has led to her imprisonment—and won her the admiration of countless world leaders. In her memoir, Unbowed, she traces her life from its humble beginnings in rural Kenya to the morning of October 8, 2004, when she learned she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet despite her many achievements, Maathai tells us that her work has only begun.

You recall with great clarity the events that defined your life. Was it difficult to remember them?

Finding the time was the greatest challenge. I worked on this project even as I continued all my other activities. It is not easy to forget events that shape you. These memories are constantly being tapped in the course of your life to define who you are. The writing process was also facilitated by the help I received from family, friends, and supporters.

This is more than the story of your life. It is also the story of Africa. Was this your intention?

Not really, but it would have been difficult to convey the experiences of my life without unraveling the historical context within which my life was unfolding. I hope when people read my book they will identify their own experiences in my journey and will be encouraged to make the best of theirs. I also hope it will help them understand Africa and the experiences of its people.

You studied in America in the late 1960s. What impact did those tumultuous years in U.S. history have on you?

America's diversity, influence, expansiveness, beauty, and its ability to nurture and neglect at the same time are some of the characteristics that made a permanent impact on my mind. I carried its energy and confidence back with me to Kenya, and that helped me in my efforts to transform my own country.

What more must be done to address the poverty that continues to plague Africa?

The leadership in Africa can do a lot, and indeed there has been some progress. Globally, politics notwithstanding, Africa can do with more genuine friends both at the bilateral level and within global institutions such as the World Trade Organization. With greater understanding, individual citizens can do a lot to push their governments to be more responsible beyond their borders.

You say education should not take people away from the land. Is this still happening?

At least in Africa, where people's livelihoods were dependent on primary natural resources and where labor was intensive, education was perceived as a gateway to light work, which led to a better quality of life. But when we get alienated from the land, we destroy the resources upon which our survival depends and thereby undermine our quality of life.

What's next on your list of priorities?

Being a Peace Laureate means that I am now a permanent ambassador for peace wherever I go. It entails sharing my work, inspiration, my thoughts on peace, democracy, and the sustainable management of resources. So I have a lot to do! —Mirela Roncevic