These Books Matter 2022

 Lots of books are published each year, and many of them contribute in some way: they inform, remember, correct the record, advance a new idea, edify, inspire and/or entertain.  But there are a smaller number of books that matter.

Though what matters can mean different things.  Some books matter because of their consequences over time.  Novels (like plays, movies and songs) can become beloved, or in the overused term, "iconic" or even "classic." Typically they speak to different people in different ways, saying different things to each.  Yet they remain memorable for many, and eventually become cultural touchstones that nearly everyone knows at least a little.  

However, identifying such books is best accomplished years afterwards.  Less time needs to pass perhaps to see a novel's influence in the world.  For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, published almost two years ago,  has clearly become a book that matters.  Not only is it the author's best-selling novel but it has entered into, and in some ways focused, discussions on how to address the climate crisis future, not only in the U.S. but perhaps even more strongly in Europe and internationally.  Richard Powers' two most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, have also exerted strong responses and focused emotions, inquiry and discussion on a range of related topics: not just forest issues, but questions of what constitutes life and intelligence, and the relationships of humans to the rest of life--what is increasingly called the "more than human world."   

Nonfiction books can perhaps be more easily identified more quickly as books that matter.  Published nearly a decade ago now, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is clearly a book that matters.  Applying contemporary economic and historical analysis to very basic questions, Picketty both inspired and coalesced important thinking about basic changes in economic structures needed to make a stable and better future.  Its analysis of the failures of today's economic order and prevailing conservative philosophy, particularly showing the dangers of the huge gaps between the few at the top and everyone else, has become influential even to approaches less radical than Picketty might favor, such as a simple return to the Keynesian economics that prevailed in the U.S. from FDR until Reagan.  That analysis which shows that prosperity is attained by supporting the middle class and public sector investment is becoming U.S. policy again under the Biden administration, in what journalist Michael Tomasky is calling Middle-Out Economics, the title of his new book: perhaps a candidate for a book that matters. (In the meantime, this Politico piece and interview is a good summary.)

But books can matter before their influence is measured simply by being crucial contributions on crucial topics. They are groundbreaking in important ways, though not necessarily unique.  Their importance depends as well on how riveting they are to read.  I have several candidates for books that matter on this basis, published in the past year or so.  It's not an exhaustive list; perhaps the minimum.  The order in which I present them does not imply rank.  What links them is that they present in a generous if not full way a dramatically new synthesis that tells us something startling about our world that upends conventional wisdom and offers a new framework for perceiving and acting in the world.  In that sense, they bring the news.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Published towards the end of last year, this book is already influencing newer work.  Its scope is enormous: nothing less than the human story.  The linear story of development (or evolution of society) is a comfortable one for many reasons.  It simplifies textbook categories, and it leads logically and inevitably to contemporary "advanced" societies, the apex of it all: from caveman to capitalism.  Who loves this story?  The same type folks who extracted "Social Darwinism" from the complexities of Darwinian evolution.  Robber barons like John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie saw that it was good, and gave it their monied blessings.

According to the two Davids, both archaeologists, the story is wrong, right from the beginning. Modern humans weren't the sole apex of evolution--other humanoids had real societies, too, with all the elements of intelligence and expression.  We carry some of their genes. 

Society did not develop or even change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urban.  All these forms coexisted and intermingled, and there were many hybrids.  There were urban societies without kings or rulers, and tyrannical hunter-gatherers.  The Davids may be a little judgey in their descriptions of the varieties of Native (North and South) American societies, but they make their point--they were not simple or primitive or identical; they were often sophisticated, complex, various and sometimes large.  

This book emphasized an historical point that has since been taken up by others: that the form of democracy that governed the Six Nations Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) that lasted longer than our democracy has so far, was patiently explained to Benjamin Franklin and others by some of its leaders, and informed the formation of the non-Native American democracy.  Too bad it didn't also adopt the Prime Directive of the  Haudenosaunee: in all decisions take into account the seventh generation to come.

This book of 692 pages is replete with examples, written with verve and wit, so it can read like a wonder book.  We don't really need Marvel or the other purveyors of outsized fantasies:  it's there in the histories that have either only recently discovered or studied, or conveniently ignored because they complicate or contradict the main story--the one that has gone a long way towards the fix we're in, on the brink of destroying it all.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong 

In Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, the character that most readers noted and remembered is a woman scientist who discovers that trees in a forest communicate with each other, and help each other chemically to ward off disease.  She is ridiculed by scandalized scientists and forced out of academia until her research is vindicated, and she becomes a kind of folk hero.

 This character is based on a real life researcher, Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree subsequently became popular.  But even more popular was a book on the same theme published a few years earlier by forester Peter Wohlleben, with the more arresting title The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.

 That book’s success, expanding on revelations about the complex life of the forest, led to a series of similar books by Wohlleben and many others, with titles often beginning with “The Hidden Life of” or “The Secret Life of” various animals, plants and other natural phenomena, including ice.  These books reflected new research but also observations that had gone unnoticed or derided because they contradicted established views on the natural world as comprised of simple if sometimes mysterious living objects, of interest mostly as exploitable for human ends.

 All of this helped prepare readers for the June 2022 publication of An Immense World by the much praised science journalist Ed Yong. It turns out that everything has a life hidden to humans, partly because our current preconceptions block awareness, but also because other lifeforms experience the world in vastly different ways.

 The key concept here is umwelt, named by early 20^th century zoologist Jakob von Uexkull.  It refers to the sensory world of animals, determined by what senses they have and what they can do.  As Yong demonstrates through scientists he visits, these vary considerably.  Some creatures taste with their feet, others hear ultrasound or see into the ultraviolet. They may sense electromagnetic waves.

   Senses that we share with other animals are used in different ways, and the balance among them can be radically different.  Dogs smell and hear better than they see—so their world is one of aroma trails.  Even their color vision is different, and one of the more startling illustrations in this book compares the colors in a typical room that we see, and how dogs see them.

Though sometimes based on dismissed and forgotten insights, most of the research is new, as scientists use new technologies to dispel old assumptions.  That birds can’t smell is one of them, but there are many more.  Some of these discoveries are astonishing:  for instance, the vocalizations and communication that goes on out of human hearing range.  We can detect only a fraction of whales’ songs, and it turns out that mice sing to each other.  At some points this book starts to sound like Douglas Adams’ humorous takes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (that mice actually run experiments on humans, that dolphins can escape human catastrophe) may have more substance than expected.

 Apart from the wondrous details, there are larger points here.  Humans assumed a lot about other life based on their own sensorium, but we’ve missed quite a lot.  “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way.  To us, it feels all-encompassing.  It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.  This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

 But science and other forms of observation at the service of human imagination can help us see not only some of the ways other lifeforms live and communicate, but how our own activities disrupt their lives.  Light pollution wreaks havoc on various birds and other animals; noise pollution in the oceans endangers whales and other sea creatures.  

Despite the book's length, Yong's precise but informal voice and his flourishes of wit make it eminently readable, yet the science reporting itself is admirable. Even the footnotes are interesting reading. It helps that what the science is reporting remains continuously fascinating. 

 This research has greatly complicated human conceptions of what other lifeforms are, and expands the notions, extent and range of sentience and intelligence. It is this theme that James Bridle takes up in his book.

 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle 

Bridle writes and thinks chiefly about technologies, and his disquiet about the direction and limitations of artificial intelligence sent him to explore other kinds of intelligences in the natural world.

 Again, the concept of Umwelt is evoked. Bridle also refers to both Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as starting points for his own explorations.  He ranges far and wide, from our humanoid ancestors to the intelligence of slime mold, and applies his observations to the new machines.  “The idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligence is the central theme of this book,” he writes.  “It emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”

 Bridle’s cogent and provocative musings apply not only to the possible futures of machine intelligence but, as Yong’s book does, to the endangered life of this planet and the necessity to actively preserve it.  As we discover and admit the extent of intelligent life and its beautiful complexity, we are close to destroying it.

 The singular and expressive organization of information and the inspired insights more than compensate for some slackness and an editorial lapse or two. Bridle's ideas and their expression in this book merit serious attention.

This recent run of books on non-human life, culminating so far in Yong and Bridle, should end any credibility given to the traditional notion of animals as natural automatons, important only as they are useful to humans, with no feelings to consider or intelligence to respect and learn from.  Gaia expanded the definition of life, and now we grapple with kinds of intelligence not only in familiar animals but plants, microbes and other life. We'd better start learning.

 One of the ideas that Bridle interrogates is the notion promoted by digital industries and other enthusiasts that intelligence is primarily based on calculation.  That is a theme in the latest novel by Dave Eggers.

 The Every: Or At Last A Sense of Order, Or The Final Days of Free Will, or Limitless Choice is Killing The World

A novel by Dave Eggers 

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might be Alice in Wonderland meets Nineteen Eighty-Four, or perhaps Brave New World would be a closer match to its onrushing dystopia.

 In this stand-alone sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, the Facebook-like corporation has merged with Amazon (referred to here as the Jungle) to form a monopolistic continuum, not only of business, not only of culture, but of shared reality.  Welcome to The Every.

 Delaney is a young woman intent on destroying The Every from the inside.  She is intelligent, intuitive, creative and acutely observant, but the plot hinges on her also being repeatedly naïve about the outcome of her efforts, as she proposes a series of outrageous changes that turn out to be big hits with The Every users, which seems to include Everyone.

 Eggers is not shy about stating his theme early in the novel: “the war on subjectivity.”  Everything is objectified to decision by calculation. (This includes the maximum number of allowable pages in a readable novel, which is 577—as it happens, the exact length of this book.) Ironically this also results in the disappearance of actual objects and authentic life, in favor of digital imagery and ideological judgments.  The result is a society caught in self-referential stasis, that punishes difference. 

 The novel does not fall easily into political categories. It exposes corporate conformism, but also its effect of cancel culture. The reasons (or excuses) given for much of the social pressure to conform are to save the environment and promote social justice.

 Delaney is a former forest ranger, so it may have seemed natural to her to organize an outing of The Every employees to visit Pacific Coast seals, but it was a disaster from start to finish, especially when they were confronted with the realities of these animals and their lives.  This incident is outrageously exaggerated and yet totally believable, and ultimately dystopic, especially given what these previous books tell us.

 It’s also funny, as is the novel generally, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. It has some characteristics of a satire of a monomanical corporate culture becoming a monoculture at large. Delaney’s best friend and fellow skeptic is the first to succumb to The Every’s embrace, supplying a horror movie vibe (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)  Delaney’s own fate involves a confrontation with the head of The Every, who was the naïve young woman protagonist of The Circle.

 There are many other related issues raised in the novel, in an entertaining narrative context that feels real right now.  The story is in development for a TV series, but right now this is a book that matters.

These four books matter because they give us crucial new information that creates a new context of how we see the world, our society and ourselves.  Right now there is no more important context that the relationship of humanity to the rest of life, and secondarily to the digital life humans are creating (for if we don't solve the survival problems associated with the first, the second won't much matter.)  They are robust enough to generate further discussion, and they cry out for action. 

R.I.P. 2022: Family

 

 William C. Kowinski, Seaman, circa 1943-45

I had just started work on this series of tributes to people who died in 2022 when I got word that a member of my own extended family passed away.

 My uncle, William Charles Kowinski, died on November 30.  In a few weeks he would have been 97 years old.  Beyond family and those who knew him (and that advanced age), he was notable as one of the last surviving 1% of the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II.  In fact there may be as few left as around 100,000.  As of the beginning of this year now ending, there were just 9,675 living in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, including my uncle.

 Until recently I’ve only known him to even refer to his wartime experiences once, and that was a single comment I overheard as a child.  A few years ago, however, he began talking about them, and went public for Memorial Day in 2020.  

 Bill dropped out of high school after his second year to join the Navy.  He told me that since both of his older brothers were found medically unfit for the armed services, he felt it was up to him.  He wanted to serve his country.

 After basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois and further training at Pearl Harbor, he joined the crew of 2700 aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania in September 1943.  He was 17.

 The Pennsylvania was classified as a super-dreadnought battleship, built in the first decade of the 20^th century.  She was too advanced to see action in World War I (she ran on scarce diesel fuel instead of coal) and by the time World War II began, she was limited by older technology, particularly radar.  But the Pennsylvania was used heavily to support troop landings, recon and other activities in the war in the Pacific with suppressing fire. It’s probably why, as Bill told me, this ship fired more rounds than any other in the history of war.  I can't even imagine what it was like to be in the bowels of an enormous ship while those huge guns were firing for hours and days at a time. 

Bill in 2020

Bill had barely a month to get used to the ship when the Pennsylvania began shelling Makin Atoll, where it was under fire from Japanese planes, and shaken by an explosion on a smaller vessel nearby.

  In January and February 1944, the Pennsylvania bombarded several of the Marshall Islands. After a memorable liberty in Australia in April, the ship began weeks of shelling various targets in Guam and other islands.

 In October 1944, the Pennsylvania was tasked with providing covering fire for activities in preparation for the assault on Leyte in the Phillippines. It was there, in the Suriago Strait, that the Pennsylvania was present and tangentially involved (chiefly anti- aircraft) in one of the decisive naval battles of the war, where US forces defeated and mostly destroyed the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy.  This was probably the battle that as a child I heard my Uncle Bill mention—he said that ships were “bottled up” (or prevented from leaving the Strait—probably referring to Japanese ships as much as American), an expression that stuck with me.

 The Pennsylvania returned to San Francisco in February for overhaul and training, probably preparing for the expected final assault on Japan itself, and didn’t leave again until July 1945.  After bombarding Wake Island, the ship arrived at Okinawa on August 12, as the flagship of Task Force 95.  Fighting had been going on for that island just 400 miles from Japan since April.  However, by the time the Pennsylvania arrived, the first atomic bomb had destroyed the city of Hiroshima in Japan on August 6, and another atom bomb obliterated Nagasaki on August 8.  Afterwards the US had communicated its terms for Japan’s surrender. 

 But at about 8 p.m. on its first night at Okinawa, a torpedo from a Japanese airplane ripped into the Pennsylvania.  The explosions awoke seaman Bill Kowinski, catching a few hours of sleep before his midnight watch.  “From that moment on it was chaos,” he told a newspaper reporter in 2020.  He followed his orders—“You just wanted to do what you could to save the ship.” 

 There was a huge hole in the ship’s side, but that area was sealed off (at the cost of 20 lives, including those killed in the explosion) and the ship survived. Three days later, the war was over, so the Pennsylvania became the last major ship to be damaged by enemy fire in World War II.

 Temporary repairs began there and later in Guam, before the ship sailed for port in the state of Washington, USA. Meanwhile, a young communications officer was tasked with organizing the burial at sea of those who’d died.  His name was Johnny Carson, known until then for doing magic tricks and telling jokes to entertain the crew.  He was a funny guy, who claimed he once pranked an admiral.

 While my Uncle Bill and the Pennsylvania were at sea on their way home, my mother and father were married. They'd met while working at a war plant.  Bill was honorably discharged in February 1946.  That summer, the Pennsylvania was back in the Pacific (without him) as a floating guinea pig in the first postwar atomic bomb tests called Operation Crossroads, which began on the day I was born.

 Bill told me that his most frequent job on the Pennsylvania was fixing radios.  After obtaining his GED from Greensburg High School, he followed up this talent by studying radio and television repair in Chicago, probably on the GI Bill and possibly at Devry Institute, for my father later took their correspondence courses on the same subjects. 

 But Bill soon began working for the Elliott Company, an engineering and manufacturing firm of turbines and related technologies.   He retired 36 years later as a quality control engineer.  His obituary notes that his goal was to enjoy retirement for at least as long a time as he was employed, and he succeeded.  He’d been born in western Pennsylvania, and except for war service, worked and lived there all his life, and died there.  But during retirement, he told me, he and his wife Carmella traveled to every state in the Union.

 Like his older brother Walter (my father), Bill married an Italian.  Many years later he would reverse-engineer a recipe for lemon pepper pasta that he tasted on a visit to Carmella’s ancestral home in Italy, and won a newspaper competition for it.

 I have a photo of Uncle Bill talking to me during a family outing on a beach when I was four.  He and Carmella  had two daughters, Carmen (“Carmie”) and Charlotte, and they, too, were part of my childhood. When I was about 12, I needed a “sponsor” to stand behind me during the Catholic ritual of Confirmation, and I selected him.  At the crucial moment he was supposed to place one hand on my shoulder, and at the actual service he added a sacrilegious squeeze. 

 We reconnected as adults—old adults—by letter, email and phone the past several years, and he helped me with Kowinski family history.  He was sharp and funny past the age of 95. I remember him as a complicated personality who became a happy and generous old man.  May he rest in peace. 

Rose Severini in the center of this Easter tableau at my grandparents, in perhaps 1964.  Except 
for my sister Debbie and me (standing), all the children are Rose and Carl's. We're holding
up Easter pastries made by my grandmother.

Earlier this year, we lost someone from the other side of my family, my aunt Rose Severini.  I remember the first time I saw her as a child, when my Uncle Carl brought her home to his parents (my grandparents) in Youngwood, PA. She was very pretty and almost as tall as Carl—the tallest person I knew—and I caught them sitting in the same living room chair—at the same time!   

 Soon she was Aunt Rosie, and their wedding reception at the Penn Albert Hotel Roof Gardens was a highlight of my childhood, as it was probably the first time I’d ever heard a live band.

 As Rose Morozowich, she grew up on a farm in western PA.  I remember visiting there a couple of times in my childhood.  She and Carl had five children, and eventually nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.  As is common in “mixed marriages” of non-Italians and Italians, the Italian side of the family became the family center, so I would see her frequently through the years at family dinners at my Severini grandparents.  Eventually, she and Carl took over this function until her own family was grown and dispersed. 

In addition to their home in Murrysville, she and Carl had their own farm in Indiana County, and they also traveled, especially after Carl’s retirement.  When I saw them last in 2019, they told me how many cruises they’d taken, a number I’ve forgotten but seemed to me enormous.  On that occasion my sisters and I visited them in the home we’d come to know very well over the years.  It turned out to be shortly before they gave it up and moved closer to one of their daughters in central PA. By then they'd endured the tragedy of losing their youngest child to illness, Steven, one of their two sons. They were married some 67 years.  I remember Aunt Rosie with great affection. 

 Rose passed away from the effects of a stroke.  She was 91.  May she rest in peace.

The One Who Is At Home

 Each day I long so much to see 

The true teacher. And each time

 At dusk when I open the cabin

 Door and empty the teapot,

 I think I know where he is:

 West of us, in the forest. 

 Or perhaps I am the one

 Who is out in the night,

 The forest sand wet under

 My feet, moonlight shining

 On the sides of the birch trees,

 The sea far off gleaming.

 And he is the one who is

 At home.  He sits in my chair

 Calmly; he reads and prays

 All night. He loves to feel

 His own body around him;

 He does not leave his house.

 --Francisco Albanez 

translated by Robert Bly