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Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead, our greatest living novelist, returns to Harlem in his final novel in the trilogy featuring Ray Carney, a furniture store owner and part-time fence for stolen goods. Cool Machine dazzles, both in the wordplay we expect from Whitehead and in the energetic thrum imbued in his writing. To fully appreciate this novel, readers are advised to start with the two previous books in the series, Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto. But Whitehead has talent to burn, so a reader can simply pick up the latest book, and—just like that—join Carney et al. in 1980s New York City.

Cool Machine constitutes three novellas that take us across the 1980s. Readers of the two previous Harlem Trilogy books have been with Carney since the 1950s. Now, Carney is in his 50s and his two grown kids have “spun off like rockets.” So, what is Carney to do? He tends to his store, sure. But knowing his kids want no part of it, there’s a certain spark missing from the narrative that is Carney’s life. When some white bankers deny his wife a business loan to start her own travel agency, Carney is compelled to return to the crooked world. In other words, Carney is alive again.

As with all of the Harlem novels, heists abound. What’s unique in this circumstance is the series of events that lead Carney to join a crew in a heist’s inception and execution, rather than just off-loading stolen goods. And if you’re a sucker for heist tales, reading about how and why the crew boosts Jesse Owens’ Olympic gold medal from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel is about as entertaining as it gets.

Because Carney has never lived anywhere but Harlem, he’s continually coming across visual reminders of his hardscrabble upbringing, most notably memories of his late cousin Freddie. Deceased for decades, Freddie is still a source of moral ambiguity for Carney. They were both born into a criminal world. But while Carney sought no small amount of normalcy, Freddie sank deeper into the underworld. How much Carney could have saved Freddie is a working question, brought to the fore once again when Freddie’s son, Robert, is in trouble with both the law and the Italian mafia.

Robert is an enigma to Carney, for while he’s helped out his nephew over the years, including employment at his store, he feels as though Robert merely tolerates him: “Politely tolerated, like when you take a perfunctory bite of your host’s cake.” Carney concludes that Robert is not cut out for New York City, even though he has never lived anywhere else. “A New Yorker was kidnapper and hostage in one, setting the impossible ransom for their own deliverance.”

And ultimately this is a novel about New York City. Whitehead manages to bring the city’s life to the page. As you read, you feel the city’s nonstop bass. A native New Yorker, Whitehead creates a protagonist who can only exist in New York City. To Carney, living in NYC is the only option, because it’s the only city that makes sense to him. Manhattan Island is a metaphor for life because—in the end—it’s on its own. “The underlying melody of death and rebirth in blocks and avenues. You wake up to discover that the city has unveiled another version when you weren’t looking.” It can be harsh, grinding down those who can’t join its unyielding churn. But to Carney, that churn is a foundation, the one thing he knows to be true. “That was the rule. That was the system: constant, turbulent change.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

White River Crossing by Ian McGuire

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If you value that there was once a Cormac McCarthy in the world, a writer who had his characters say such things as “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery,” then it’s more than recommended you pick up an Ian McGuire novel. His settings are historical and violent, where optimism is always in short supply. It may sound paradoxical, but such bleakness opens the possibilities, especially in the hands of an expert novelist.

In White River Crossing, it’s 1766 and a small group leaves Prince of Wales Fort in what is now Manitoba. Three of the men are technically employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, but the fort’s chief factor has them swear not to divulge the true nature of their mission to the others. The reason: they believe gold deposits exist far in the north, and they intend to keep it for themselves.

Their indigenous guide, Datsanthi, thinks it’s a bad idea, for he doesn’t trust the Inuit in the far north. Not only is the feeling mutual among the Inuit, two of the Hudson’s Bay men, Thomas Hearn and John Hearn, don’t trust each other either. To say the least, things are not going to go well.

Back in England, Hearn once studied to become a minister. But the sudden deaths of his mother and sister obliterated his faith. Scripture “became like frail constructions designed to obscure the horrid truths of human suffering and death.” Bookish and a loner, he stands in contrast to Shaw, a man for whom logic and reason hold little purchase. Shaw will be swayed “by only the application of a moral force as massive, brutish, and unyielding as his own.”

Throughout, it’s almost impossible for each respective faction to fully understand each other. While it might be benign and amusing that an Inuit chief who is ridiculously squat in build be described as resembling a “fairground pugilist,” it’s downright dangerous for the Company men not to fully appreciate how the indigenous operate in their demon-haunted world. Their daily motivations, of course, are very different from men willing to risk everything for gold.

When Keasik, Datsanthi’s daughter in law, is convinced that the fat-bodied raven following the party is actually a spirit seeking revenge, a weary Hearn eventually tells her that sometimes a “bird is just a bird.” Keasik basically pities him, wondering how he and others like him know so little about the world. She knows a “curse is still a curse.”

As one calamitous event begets another, tagging along with these folks as things deteriorate makes for a captivating read. It’s of course a tale of how avarice spins one’s moral compass. But it also illustrates how the pursuit of gain can become dangerously “self-justified, unchained by fear” and can make one feel “fully, astoundingly, alive.” In a world of pain and chaos, holding the coin of the realm in your hand will often cause it to close to an unyielding fist.

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Review by Jason Sullivan

The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera

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In Gordon Corera’s The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, we read how in 1968 a sixteen-year-old street tough swaggered his way up to the KGB building in Leningrad to ask how he could get a job there. He was told to come back when he either completed military service or earned a university degree. His name was Vladimir Putin.

During that same year, there was a KGB officer working as an archivist in Moscow’s powerful First Chief Directorate office, the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence. He was undertaking a secret mission, one that he devised and kept completely to himself. His name was Vasili Mitrokhin, and his mission was to copy the archives that would hasten the demise of the Soviet Union.

It didn’t start off this way for Mitrokhin, notes Corera. He was once a believer of the communist ideals that had propelled Russia into the revolution of 1917, so much so he was honored to become a KGB officer. But then the reality of the work almost left him speechless. Of his early assignments, he would only say, “I saw horrors.” And after he bungled a high-profile assignment as a field agent, he was told he would never again work abroad. Being sent to the archives room was seen as a humiliation, a way to park a failed officer and forget about him.

Dissident movements find a way under authoritarian regimes. Mitrokhin was impressed with the bravery of underground writers, especially since they knew the full weight of KGB power would find and arrest them. He may not have been in a position to resist via his writings, but he was the only person who had complete access to one very specific KGB basement archive. Mitrokhin quite literally worked in the belly of the beast.

Despite a brief period of hope resulting from Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization efforts—specifically his allowing the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich— Mitrokhin resented how the Soviets encouraged Russians to inform on each other. He also knew that Soviet party elites sought only to perpetuate their own power. Year after year he copied documents through an encrypted code. On weekends he traveled alone to his family’s dacha outside of Moscow to hide the transcripts under the dwelling. What to do with these papers was a whole other conundrum. It wasn’t until the fall of the Soviet Union that he had his first viable chance.

It was still an exceptionally dangerous environment. It’s not as though most in the KGB stopped being authoritarians. They wanted power and influence in this new Russia, so they would certainly arrest someone caught with secrets that would undermine their futures.

Corera structures the book so that we know the results right from the start. He then slowly details how in 1992 Mitrokhin ended up walking into the British Embassy in Lithuania. The American Embassy was his first attempt. But given that they were already overrun with a flood of Russians seeking to trade state secrets in exchange for either money or relocation, Mitrokhin was lost in flux (which he resented).

In many ways, reading how British MI6 and Mitrokhin finally agreed to various arrangements are the most compelling parts of the book. It was a decorous dance between the two parties. Mitrokhin was savvy enough to structure his notes so that anyone wanting access to them had to agree to his demands. Of course the British were slow to trust this unknown KGB officer. Was he a double agent? In addition, unknown defectors were often viewed with great skepticism. They had a saying: “Defectors defect because they are defective.”

The breadth of the archive meant the CIA and the FBI were brought in to examine its contents. Yet it’s not as though the American and British spooks were jumping up and down with delight. Here were documents showing the number of moles within their ranks. So the archive could also be viewed as an itemization of their own failures.

Once Mitrokhin told his wife and son that he had been—surprise—hording state secrets for decades (they had no idea he had done so), MI6 ushered them out of Russia and into London in a series of events that’s worthy of a spy movie. Mitrokhin would spend the remainder of his days as an unhappy exile, a critic of the capitalist West. He was akin to Solzhenitsyn in that regard. Far from glorifying the West, they were Russian nationalists lamenting the loss of Russia mysticism to Bolshevik subjugation.

That sixteen year old who once knocked on the KGB’s door is now acting out his own laments. Putin once remarked that the fall of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” His war with Ukraine is a clear indication that he too misses the old days, with an estimated quarter of a million Russian soldiers having been killed in service to his revanchist dreams. It’s been said that Russia never had a leader who cared about the Russian people. Corera’s book certainly underscores this judgement.

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Review by Jason Sullivan

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

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It’s not unusual for revered writers to lose some of their literary vitality as they age (sorry, Don DeLillo). It also appears that Ian McEwan received his immunization against this particular affliction. What We Can Know, his 18th novel, is a prescient work of fiction that both charms and haunts. And similar to McEwan’s Atonement, a novel published a quarter century ago, What We Can Know will eventually take residence somewhere deep in memory, where recalling its very existence evokes some weighty emotions—even if the details are lost.

The novel is set not too far in the future, 2120; yet it’s still just on the other side of human catastrophe. Nation-states as we know them are gone. AI-initiated defense systems led to various nuclear exchanges. Sea levels have risen dramatically and in what used to be England—and what now appears to be a series of archipelagoes—there lives a scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, trying to piece together an understanding of life in the early 21st century.

We are given microscopic glances into the state of the world Thomas occupies, which makes sense. Thomas doesn’t even know the immediate state of his world. Global interconnectivity via the web has essentially disappeared. Thomas still has access to the detritus of the once-digital world. He can read logs of our digital correspondences and posts. But he finds them—just as most of us find them now—to be not only indigestible but also garbage.

His focus of research concerns the events surrounding a 2014 dinner party that took place at the country home of Francis Blundy, an eminent poet. It would become known as the “Second Immortal Dinner” because it was when Francis, in front of notable guests, recited a sonnet cycle for his wife entitled “A Corona for Vivien.” There was only one copy of the poem. It was never published and not known to be read by anyone other than Francis. Through attendees’ journals and letters, Thomas studies their lives and the world they occupied. So, in many ways, this is the world Thomas lives in as well, a plentiful world he can only dream about.

But, of course, Thomas must make his way in his contemporary world. If you’re a humanities instructor today and think teaching literature and history is a struggle, Thomas and his colleague—and on/off romantic partner—Rose would like for you to try it after the collapse of civilization. To their students, with their “flattened and timorous” minds, there’s almost a cruelty in studying a world that once held so much. When forced to examine the past, their students wear a particular countenance: an unspoken knowing that most of the inhabitants of the early 21st century “deserved the mega-deaths they brought upon themselves.”

To Thomas and Rose, within the years the world shattered “world literature produced its most beautiful laments, gorgeous nostalgia, eloquent fury–and those masterpieces, so we promised, we would study together.” Still, they have intense disagreements over how one should chronicle the past. Thomas is so obsessed with the missing poem, Rose believes he’s no longer acting as a responsible scholar, at least when it comes to filling in the historical blanks around the time “A Corona for Vivien” was recited.

Thomas knows that the missing poem is famous because it’s missing. The real scholarship lies in the reactions it elicited, that the idea of the poem is what people find beautiful. It’s a repository for dreams. But Thomas is fixated with the poem proper. To complete the circle, he and Rose go on a journey to find it.

McEwan forces the reader to sit with his various characters. A first-time McEwan reader may wonder if the time is worth the payoff. A returning McEwan reader knows to wait. And sure enough, like an increasing electric current, What We Can Know starts to hum. Throughout the second part of the novel, I found myself quite often smiling as I read, beguiled by McEwan’s writing and devilish techniques.

What We Can Know places the reader in a unique position, for we are contemporaries of the people Thomas studies. We understand them more than we can understand Thomas and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, regardless of the human era, “We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts,” thinks Thomas. After experiencing many tribulations, he continues, “Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst

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Imagine being stuck in a life raft on the Pacific Ocean for 118 days. Now imagine your spouse being in that bobbing raft with you. The addition of the spouse into the scenario is not meant to elicit a cheap laugh. The change in setting has a genuine bearing on one’s attitude. Instantly relieved? Or immediately tense? In 1973, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British married couple, experienced this exact event. They ended up writing a book about it, so you could just read their account. Or you could do yourself one better and read A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst.

Through Elmhirst’s narrative, not only do we read about the Bailey’s ordeal at sea, we have the added benefit of Elmhirst’s expert writing. She has a Truman Capote-like talent in describing subjects and events with expert concision. Within a matter of pages, the reader knows Maralyn and Maurice.

Prior to meeting Maurice, Maralyn’s circumstances left her feeling isolated from the life she wanted to live. Maurice, on the other hand, isolated so that he could live the life he wanted. To Maurice’s great fortune, he met Maralyn, a rare someone who shared his want to avoid a conventional work-a-day life and instead spend it outdoors. More importantly for Maurice, Maralyn didn’t seem to mind that he could be a downer, a man who rubbed most others the wrong way and had the “tendency to get in the way of uncomplicated joy.”

It was Maralyn who convinced Maurice that they should sell their English home and commission the building of a sailboat that would take them around the world, ending up in New Zealand to begin life anew. To Maralyn, it was that simple, her positivity at times bordering on naiveté. One friend later recounted that Maralyn often spoke of New Zealand as if “might still be uninhabited.”

They put their plan into action, with Maurice as skipper and navigator, and with Maralyn in charge of the supplies and the galley. Having honed their skills over the years, they were competent sailors. They successfully crossed the Atlantic and docked in Barbados with the intoxicating high of having crossed a wild ocean. Once through the Panama Canal and fully resupplied, they set out on the Pacific Ocean.

When the impact came, they were both below deck. The collision of a breaching whale, much bigger than their sailboat, sent water gushing into the cabin. They had just enough time to load some supplies into an inflatable raft and a dinghy. Maralyn took a photograph of the sailboat just before it completely disappeared, the last tip of the mast sticking out of the water “like a thin arm hoping for rescue.”

What follows over the next 118 days is about as harrowing as you can imagine. Drifting deep into the Pacific Ocean, their only potential stroke of luck was that they were in a shipping lane. But that also meant what was once a liberation, sailing the open ocean and watching a passing vessel recede into the distance, became a repeated soul-crushing occurrence. It appeared they were not going to be spotted at all, not while still being alive anyway.

It was also clear that Maurice was no longer the skipper, as Maralyn became the decisive one. Maurice would later say that he wouldn’t have survived without Maralyn’s firm belief that they would be rescued. She constantly had to keep him from giving up. Maralyn had them talk about their next boat and where they would venture; she made a deck of playing cards out of paper, which didn’t really last because of the ocean spray.

Still, they worked together in collecting rainwater to drink and in catching sea turtles to eat. One day they went on a near-rage and killed anything they could get their hands on, including small sharks that were caught by the tail. This was done as they kept a pet turtle aboard. After they were rescued, neither ate another piece of meat—of any kind—for the rest of their lives.

They said hurtful things to each other. They survived epic storms, “squall after squall.” But, writes Elmhirst, “They were alive, just.”

A Korean fishing vessel ultimately plucked them from the water. News of their rescue made them famous before they reached land. Their recovery process was long, but they would eventually acquire another boat to set sail once again.

The ultimate end—via illness—came for Maralyn long before it found Maurice. And it was as though Maurice was set adrift once again. “There had been,” however, “a strange kind of peace adrift on the ocean, even if it was a peace close to annihilation,” says Elmhirst. Now, on land and back in England, Maurice was without the one person to help him navigate life. He shuffled around, becoming once again—shall we say—a bit much to take. Whether waiting for rescue on the open ocean or acting on your own volition with two feet firmly on land, that time is yours. Writes Elmhirst, “…dying is still a process. You’re still alive while you’re dying.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

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The mind’s eye tends to summon associated grandeur when visualizing Elizabethan England. The reality is that if you were a contemporary from, say, Italy, all-things-English really wasn’t worth your time. There was no point in learning English, as anything of value written by an English author would have been available in Latin. Also pointless was crossing the Channel for a visit. London in the mid-16th century was a cultural backwater, where if there was any theater to be had it was usually a theater of cruelty, comprised of bear-baiting and public executions.

But then, almost in a rush, from England emerged two of history’s greatest playwrights. William Shakespeare was fortunate to live long enough to produce a vast canon of work. The other playwright was on the other side of longevity, having been murdered at age 29. And in Stephen Greenblatt’s excellent new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, we read about the life of this other playwright: Christopher Marlowe.

If you’re like me, you knew that there was indeed a Christopher Marlowe and that he wrote The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Beyond that, however, I didn’t know much. But in reading Greenblatt’s compelling narrative, I realized that I’ve known Marlowe all along. When we’re listening to a Shakespeare play, specifically Hamlet and Macbeth, we’re hearing Marlowe’s influence. For Marlowe not only infused vitality into the English language via unrhymed iambic pentameter, his plays explored a character’s inner life. Shakespeare’s work stands on its own, of course. “But Shakespeare saw that he could now enter territory into which no one before Marlowe had dared to venture,” writes Greenblatt. The world in which these two men lived, who were roughly the same age, was a dangerous one. Free-thinking could lead to your demise, and that’s precisely where Marlowe ventured.

Greenblatt, a leading Shakespearean scholar, is the perfect guide into this world. When he says, “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater is pre- and post-Tamburlaine” (Marlowe’s first play), the succinctness underscores its importance. Greenblatt has spent his long academic career developing New Historicism, a literary theory that stresses the importance of studying a text within the cultural context in which it was written. How this benefits us, the general reader, is that he’s a master of not only introducing Marlowe’s works, but also of noting the caprices that marked living in the late 1500s.

It seems more than a touch improbable that the son of an illiterate cobbler would ascend to such literary heights. Given that little is known about Marlowe—other than his works—part of the fun is reading how Greenblatt builds the architecture of Marlowe’s short life. And when no definitive answer emerges, the open questions are intriguing. For example, how did an early-teen Marlowe earn a scholarship to a private school when neither of his parents were capable of teaching him how to read?

A formal education was revelatory for Marlowe, culminating in two degrees from Cambridge University. Through rigorous study, specifically studying Greek and Latin, a world of creative possibilities opened for Marlowe. His contemporary world was one of religious turmoil, where it was determined whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant based on the religious preference of the seated monarch. Religious texts were limiting and could not ultimately sustain the mind. Classic texts, on the other hand, were a way of freeing the mind. So reading Ovid, for example, appealed to more primal human emotions. Add to that working through the humanism found in early Italian Renaissance texts, you have potentially churned out a graduate who will question religious dogma.

And yet this was the exact opposite of what was expected of Cambridge graduates. It was hoped a life in the church (in the power structure) would be the subsequent choice. This was not for Marlowe.

Marlowe’s graduate degree was almost not conferred due his lengthy unexplained absence. Greenblatt consults Cambridge’s dining hall ledgers (the Buttery books) to mark Marlowe’s absence and return, replete with a marked influx of funds for food and drink. Also surviving is a document from Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council requesting that Marlowe be awarded his MA degree, for “he had done her Majesty good service.” In short, Marlowe was a spy for the crown.

His Cambridge degrees meant Marlowe could be considered a gentleman. Yet despite the popularity of his plays, he was paid little for their productions; and given England’s strict class distinctions, Marlowe could only rise so far. His renown did put him in the orbit of powerful individuals, such as Walter Raleigh, who happened to crave knowledge beyond what was accepted by scripture.

It was around this time that Marlowe wrote the retelling of Doctor Faustus. Greenblatt’s analysis of the play as it relates to both its lasting influence and its immediate significance is about as engaging as it comes. In the end, the words Marlowe gave to his characters burned with such suggestion they led an old enemy to suggest that Marlowe was an atheist. Whether he was murdered by order of the crown or, as the official report read, stabbed to death over his share of a dinner bill, the end came in a small room inside of a tavern.

The book’s subtitle seems to have been the work of the publisher to hook potential readers. No doubt there was some literary competition between Shakespeare and Marlowe, but not with any apparent animosity. In fact, Greenblatt notes that the scholarly consensus is that Marlowe co-authored portions of Shakespeare’s Henry VI. And Shakespeare references Marlowe’s death in As You Like It when the jester, Touchstone, says, “When a man’s verses cannot be understood…it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”

The only known portrait of Marlowe was almost lost to history. In 1953, during renovation work at Cambridge University, someone noticed several painted boards in a dumpster. They were assembled and restored, resulting in a portrait of an insouciant young man with auburn hair. Below the Latin inscription “Aetatis suae 21 1585” (Aged 21,1585) is the Latin motto “Quod me nutrit me destruit” (“That which nourishes me destroys me”).

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Review by Jason Sullivan

After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice by Erling Kagge

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The North Pole, according to Erling Kagge, exists as a reductio ad absurdum. Having no longitude, it’s really no place at all. The same applies to the South Pole, of course. But unlike the South Pole, walking to the top of the world must be accomplished atop sea pack ice. Once there, fixing your position at 90°N means you can decide the time of day. All hours apply. But it’s only temporary, as the pack ice is already floating you away. The North Pole will allow a visitor, just not a permanent one.

Because he made the trek there in 1990, Kagge has the authority to regale us about the North Pole. And in After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice, we see why it’s fitting that one of history’s most elusive places seems to repel all comers. Throughout this travel narrative, Kagge also provides a history of Arctic exploration. Ultimately, he’s asking a singular question: Why are we compelled to venture north?

What lies “north of the north winds” has been a source of wonder since antiquity. Kagge notes how Herodotus’ Hyperborea, a land to the north “where people lived in peace and harmony” and “where the sun went to rest,” was drawn on maps up until the Enlightenment. After all, compasses were already in use and they, of course, pointed north. So something must lie beyond immediate reach.

Even as Europeans circumnavigated the globe, they still couldn’t breach the northern icy waters. Kagge takes us through familiar history, detailing the search for the Northwest Passage and the big names from the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration (Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, to name a few). If this era of history is nothing new to you, it’s tempting to skim such sections. But Kagge does more than just repeat their narratives. He’s uniquely qualified to delve into the psyche of these famous explorers and comment on their decisions while they were on their respective explorations.

The nuances of Kagge’s own journey to the North Pole comprise some of the book’s most engaging moments. He describes an environment that’s absent of all aromas. Given the frigid temperatures, any particle that might carry an aroma quickly turns to ice. During some stretches, the sea ice is so thin he compares it to walking on a waterbed. He melts sea ice for drinking water. How, one might wonder, does one drink sea water? The answer lies in the ice’s age. It has to be at least a year old so as to have gone through the process of pressing out the salt. Plus there’s the constant risk of polar bear attacks. (He ends up shooting and killing a bear that charged him.)

Of course one can take a small plane and land on an ice floe. Or, more ominously, you can climb into a nuclear-powered submarine and slip under the ice. Various navies have been doing this for decades.

With rising global temperatures, there’s the open question of just how much ice will remain in the coming years. Kagge notes that the Arctic is warming at twice the global rate. What this portends for the earth is an open question. But as a warning, Kagge shares Margaret Atwood’s comparison of the earth to that of a dying tree: the decay is first noticed at the top. What is known is that the Russian military is taking advantage of the warming temperatures by constructing military bases farther and farther north.

Nevertheless, Kagge’s book is ultimately about stepping into the ineffable. In the end, he doesn’t know why he’s compelled to explore to the point of near death. Is it from believing that some form of contentment can result only from overcoming a challenge and perhaps coming face-to-face with the sublime? That’s certainly part of it, Kagge admits. Do I believe he’s chasing in the extreme what the rest of experience during, say, a difficult hike, where there’s restorative power of having to be present in the moment? I believe so.

For some polar explorers, they are only at ease while on expedition, says Kagge. Perhaps they are akin to migratory birds, those flying compasses. The earth’s magnetic field just points them north.

The derring-dos of the famous explorers of yesteryear certainly had an outsized effect on the imaginations of others. And if they disappeared and never returned, well, all the more dramatic. Take John Franklin, who vanished while on expedition in 1845. Kagge describes how there’s a marble bust of Franklin in Westminster Abbey. Below it, there’s a verse from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem honoring Franklin: “Not here! The white north hath thy bones, and thou, heroic sailor-soul, art passing on thine happier voyage now toward no earthly pole.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

The Spinach King by John Seabrook

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In John Seabrook’s The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, the author notes Andrew Carnegie’s dictum of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” It’s a fitting citation as the American dynasty at play here is in fact his own family. How the proverb diverges with the Seabrooks in particular is that instead of the third generation squandering the wealth created by the first, the Seabrook who creates a business empire is the very one who spitefully destroys it. If this sounds intriguing, settle into the story of the Seabrooks.

In the early twentieth century, New York City relied on—as it had for over a century—New Jersey farms to supply its markets with fresh produce. Known as the “Garden State,” New Jersey was quite literally New York City’s garden. One such gardener was C.F. Seabrook. Not only did he take over his father’s 60-acre farm, he transformed it from yet another cottage producer into a farming juggernaut. Using Henry Ford’s production models as a guide, he revolutionized farming by mechanizing his farm, most notably utilizing vast overhead irrigation systems.

Emboldened, he engaged in the time-honored practice of self-dealing. Using the permissive political climate of times, he became the highway commissioner not only to decide the road routes that would advantage his farming empire but also to profit from the road-building business he started. His intercontinental contacts even led to a contract with Joseph Stalin to build thousands of miles of roads throughout Russia. The effort basically ended before it started, however. Seabrook didn’t know how to engineer roads in the Russian climate. The roads fell apart soon after they were put down.

Wall Street creditors, no longer tolerating such a massively overbuilt enterprise, eventually called in the Seabrook loans. But Seabrook Farms would rebuild again, gaining a niche in freezing the vegetables they grew, thus ushering in the age of frozen store-bought vegetables. Of C.F.’s children, John Seabrook, the author’s father, would go on to display the most astute business acumen.

When writing about his father—and there’s a lot here—Seabrook seemingly lays everything out there. If anything, he’s writing almost to see if he can better know—actually know—his aloof yet caring father, a man who used his “WASP identity like razor wire to guard his true feelings.” Fair enough. Yet so much has been written about WASPs over the decades, we already know of the characteristics without reading about them once again. Still, how they manifest in John Seabrook is interesting in how they are told.

A Princeton graduate, Seabrook Sr. would go on to date Eva Gabor. An Anglophile in not only temperament but also in English tailoring, he later in life even had one of those clothing carousel contraptions you see at a dry cleaners installed in his bedroom. He was also dedicated to the sport of British coaching—basically driving a small team of horses while sitting atop a carriage, often sporting a top hat.

At times, Seabrook’s writing of his father almost appears hagiographic. Even under this bright-light memoir exposure, there’s quite a bit of admiration for his father. And it’s often the case that wealthy children who once had a temporary job where they had to get their hands dirty will forever hasten to relate how they once had a job where they had to get their hands dirty. Such is the case here.

But these are minor issues in a family story that’s ultimately tragic. Seabrook Farms probably would have continued to thrive under the leadership of John Seabrook Sr., a man who seemed naturally inclined to be a C.E.O. (Although there are some intriguing revelations later in the book.) The end came, nevertheless, at C.F.’s own hand, the paterfamilias who sought to destroy his own family. There’s a lot to unpack in this downfall. But I will say: I’m not sure what clinically constitutes a sociopath, but it seems as though C.F. certainly was one.

As one would expect from a staff writer at The New Yorker, Seabrook knows his way around a narrative. There’s no way this family history could be told without writing about social and political intersectionality. Even today, you can go visit Seabrook, New Jersey.

Still, this is a family memoir. And it’s affecting to see how Seabrook Sr. and Jr. almost observe each other as curiosities. It’s also dispiriting to read how Sr., once a dynamic and forward-thinking man, ended up an elderly man who digested too much cable news and ultimately displayed one of C.F.’s many loathsome traits: antisemitism, that “ancient Roman mind virus.”

In the end, Seabrook Sr.’s death wasn’t noted with a lengthy New York Times obituary. Perhaps it was for the best. Regardless of your success, or with how self-important you may feel, you can still end up being known simply as—as Art Buchwald once referred to Seabrook Sr.—“the frozen-food lima bean king from New Jersey.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley

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A quick glance at the cover of Austin Kelley’s novel, The Fact Checker, and you’ll recognize by font alone that the fact-checking taking place is at The New Yorker. The magazine in the novel is unnamed, but we get the gist. Plus, Kelley’s bio states that he was once a fact checker at—you got it—The New Yorker. The narrator, known to us as the Fact Checker, describes his life during a story he was assigned in 2004. An entertaining and sprightly read, it’s also a novel describing a world that manages to be both foundational to our current world and yet long gone at the same time.

Our fact checker is good at his job. We meet him as he describes investigating one story’s accuracy by quizzing (almost badgering) the widow of a fallen CIA officer. It’s all in service to the article, to its veracity. We also get the impression that he doesn’t mind name-dropping during casual conversation that he works for an esteemed New York magazine (even if he’s not authoring any of its stories). Still, he confesses that he’s “always drowning in a storm of information and doubt.” And he freely admits that he confuses his desires and disdains in both his personal and professional lives.

It’s pretty clear his girlfriend left him because she found his encyclopedic conversation corrections exhausting. It’s also evident he’s unsure of what to do about this pedantic trait of his. And it’s more than certain he doesn’t recognize that his internal moral outrage to boorish behavior he sees in others belies his own personal actions.

What provides him a singular purpose is a low-stakes story he’s assigned. A vendor at a city farmer’s market is selling a particular type of tomato that’s blowing everyone’s hair back. In the article, the Fact Checker is intrigued by a quote from a vendor employee, Sylvia, who says there’s also some “nefarious business” at the market. He finds Sylvia at the market and is completely beguiled by her. His opposite in almost every way, she takes him out one night to an underground supper club in the city. He learns a fair bit about her (she says she was raised in a cult). Yet, despite his repeated questions, he learns nothing about the supposed nefarious business.

Kelley captures the early aughts well. It’s a world where the George W. Bush administration had already presented their case for invading Iraq. To many, this presentation strained credulity as not only were there disagreements over what can be considered as fact, but also of what truths one can responsibly glean from said facts. Regardless, a presidential administration believing that they even need to justify its actions—to publicly persuade—seems like a bygone era.

We see the emerging urban hipsters, with some sporting a “jug band chic” look. The Fact Checker finds himself at a meeting of self-professed anarchists where there’s an unironic call to conduct a feasibility study of the group’s proposed actions. Food culture is taking off in New York City. One magazine writer, having just spent some time with a group of people who raise and harvest their own meat, decides to export the practice to his high-end NYC apartment.

In a tragi-comic scene, the Fact Checker stops by the author’s apartment and discovers that in the swanky bathroom there’s a lamb to be slaughtered. And kill it they do, the dead lamb ending up strung along the author’s back like a cape, which reminds our narrator of a skinny Hercules statue “with carefully coiffed hair and a dead sheep on his back, a lanky, stooped Hercules in a Picasso painter’s outfit in his blond Japanese soaking tub in his SoHo loft.”

Sylvia leaves the Fact Checker a cryptic note and promptly disappears. Hoping to find answers, he travels out to the communal New Jersey farm where she worked only to find that the commune’s inhabitants are just as clueless to her whereabouts. The Fact Checker is struggling to determine the facts and—without a doubt—the truth. The only thing he’s certain of is that the commune’s leader is “a lecherous hypocrite” who’s hiding something.

At the beginning of the novel, the Fact Checker chats with a woman he just met in a coffee shop, back when all “tentative and ambitious New Yorkers” had to meet each other through face-to-face conversation. Noticing that he’s nearsighted, she suggests he break periodically during the work day, look out a window, and then focus on the farthest object in view. He doesn’t believe this will benefit his eyesight, yet he does it at times. When helping with some farming work at the commune, he stops and looks out into the distance. “Someday it’s going to help, this staring into space, I thought, even if that help is nothing but a psychological balm, a sort of placebo effect on the problem of existence.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham

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January 28, 1986, was the day NASA’s carefully cultivated image literally blew up at 46,000 feet. If you are of a certain age, you probably recall where you were when you heard the news. That morning, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. The inquiry that followed revealed that in order to meet its frenetic launch schedules, NASA officials were willing to overlook known problems with the shuttle’s reusable solid rocket boosters. In Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham unpacks the story with methodical detail. It’s chilling because in reading the preceding engineering and managerial decisions, you know you are also reading the anatomy of a future catastrophe.

Tragedy is nothing new in NASA’s storied history of course, with Higginbotham taking us back to the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew during a lauchpad test. Going forward, astronaut trainees were required to listen to the audio of the crew members imploring that they be released from the command module because they were burning to death. Higginbotham also revisits how a fickle public became rather blasé with repeated moon landings, with some complaining to television networks that their favorite programs were being interrupted with yet more moon-landing footage.

Funding NASA has always been fraught, regardless of the space program. When the space agency decided to pursue flying a reusable space plane with reusable solid rocket boosters, the new astronaut class was preparing to fly missions under the very real possibility that the new shuttle program would not come to fruition. Cost overruns and delays continually tested Congress’ patience.

If you’re a space dork (like me), you’ll devour reading about the interregnum period between the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. The focus changed from swaggering test pilots manning moon-shot rockets to research-based scientists conducting experiments in orbit. The test pilots still had their place, to be sure. Someone had to land an orbiter reentering as a glider. But gone were the days when Mercury astronauts enjoyed dollar-a-year leases on sports cars.

Nonetheless, as with any space program, defining “acceptable risk” is a necessity. Engineers didn’t really know if this new space plane/truck would survive reentry. And firing rockets with solid propellants may indeed save money, but it’s also exceptionally dangerous. Once lit, the rocket fires until it’s out of fuel. Higginbotham compares it to lighting a firework. When the various shuttles did eventually launch, the percussion waves were so pronounced and damaging, high-pressure streams of water were sprayed around the lauchpad to dampen the acoustics.

Thiokol, a private contractor based in Utah, designed and built the boosters. Given their massive size, they had to be built into segments for transportation. Once at Cape Canaveral, they were made vertical and sealed with rubber O-rings. After the boosters burned their fuel, they were released from the shuttle and then retrieved from the Atlantic Ocean. In the process of repurposing the rockets, Thiokol engineers discovered that the O-rings were less than reliable. If enough gas escaped from any given segment, the results would be catastrophic for the crew.

Higginbotham provides an in-depth history of the O-ring debacle. No internal memo or meeting escapes an airing. We know where this is heading of course, and it’s amazing the astronauts were never briefed on the suspect O-rings. As we winnow our way down to the January 1986 launch, we come across every frustrating misstep. There was extra publicity with this launch as one crew member was middle school teacher Christa McAuliffe. She was the first of NASA’s “teachernaut” program, a publicity effort to demonstrate the accessibility of space flight.

The unusually low air temps that week led to the unprecedented recommendation among Thiokol engineers to scrub the launch. The O-rings, they argued, would be compromised under such conditions. Administrators decided to fire the rockets anyway. Launch schedules had to be made and all eyes were on this launch in particular. On the morning of January 28, it looked as though it would be a successful booster firing, with the shuttle ascending as planned. But then at 11:39 A.M., it exploded in full view.

NASA originally reported that the crew was vaporized in the explosion. However, the wreckage pulled from the ocean revealed human remains. So it’s quite possible the crew was conscious as the orbiter plummeted to the ocean. After a dramatic investigation, changes were made with the booster rockets and space shuttle flights resumed. Still, make no mistake, there were deep rifts within NASA.

Throughout the book, Higginbotham gives us brief histories into the lives of the Challenger crew. President Reagan, along with his speechwriter Peggy Noonan, certainly did their part to humanize the first astronauts to perish during flight. In a public address just after the explosion, Reagan said, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” To Reagan’s credit, he understood that space exploration holds liminal space within our minds, and as such, during times of tragedy, words to describe what is almost indescribable matter.

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Review by Jason Sullivan