Saturday, October 26, 2013

Dear Life

Dear Life
by Alice Munro
Knopf, 2013. 319 pgs. Fiction

The Nobel Prize Committee for Literature has made it abundantly clear that the prize is unlikely to go to an American in the foreseeable future, shallow and self-serving as we are. Fortunately, they did not exclude Canadians and Alice Munro won this year's award to great and well-deserved acclaim. Though this collection sounds and looks like it might be a sentimental collection about the joys of living, it is anything but. "Dear" in this title often means costly - almost more than one can afford. Again and again her low-key, commonplace characters manage to destroy their own happiness or avoid it instinctively, for fear of the responsibility or for fear of losing the lives they know, happy or not. In "Amundsen," a young woman travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium where against all odds she may have found her true love--or not. "Haven" recounts the miserable life of a woman whose husband makes their home anything but a haven. The last four stories of the book are reflective of, and perhaps derived from, Munro's own life. A sort of benediction, since she has announced her retirement from writing. But maybe not--though tired of the solitary writer's life, she still gets "ideas."

LW


Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
by Eric Schlosser
Penguin, 2013. 632 pgs, including notes and indexing. Nonfiction.

When I was a kid we trooped out into the halls of our elementary school several times a year, and crouched against the wall with our faces on the floor and our hands over our heads to practice saving ourselves in the event of a nuclear blast.  As if.  The same false sense of security that our bomb drills gave us then seems to have suffused the American public.  Little did we know that we were probably safer from a Soviet attack than we were from our own munitions. Eric Schlosser's encyclopedic, extraordinary new book shows us how much danger we were in then, and how scary things may still be, here and in countries like India, Pakistan, China, North Korea, and Iran. Focusing on the deadly accident at a Titan II missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas, Schlosser explains in chilling detail how terribly things can go wrong, and how quickly. The entire development and dispersion of nuclear armaments as part of the Cold War is laid out here in fascinating, frightening detail. Schlosser, as the New Yorker magazine reviewer suggests, "writes nonfiction as it ought to be written."  Amen.

LW