NONFICTION: ADVENTURE
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey
Susan Casey has a thing about the ocean. Her first book, “The Devil’s Teeth,” chronicled her sojourn among great white sharks and the scientists who study them off the Farallon Islands near San Francisco.
Now she has immersed herself in another chronicle of men (well, mostly men) and the sea, this one focused on a force of nature even bigger and more powerful than the implacable beasts of her previous work.
“The Wave” is exactly what its cover advertises: a book about huge waves and the equally outsize personalities who spend (and occasionally risk) their lives trying to measure, understand, predict and sometimes even ride them on surfboards.
This might seem a bit of a gimmick, blending as it does the worlds of meteorologists and physicists, among others, with portraits of gnarly surfer dudes such as Laird Hamilton, whose obsessive — some would say suicidal — quest to hurl himself off the lips of waves the size of seven-story buildings provides the book with its main narrative thread.
But somehow it all hangs together. This is due in part to its scary environmental theme and especially to Casey’s singular fascination with waves, the bigger the better, which emerge not just as hydrological phenomena but as distinctive, often malevolent personalities that in some ways are the most interesting characters in her book.
They are certainly the most deadly. Readers may want to pop a Dramamine before reading Casey’s account of the RSS Discovery, a British research vessel that was nearly pounded to smithereens by a massive storm in the North Atlantic in 2000. Instruments on board measured the “significant wave height” — an average of the largest 33 percent of the waves — at 61 feet, “the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean” (some spiked as high as 100 feet).
The episode added to growing evidence about the prevalence of so-called rogue waves, which can rise up unexpectedly from much smaller seas. The question Casey poses at the outset of her book — and that animates much of what follows — is whether climate change is likely to generate even bigger waves.
If so, a handful of elite athletes will be waiting eagerly on the beach. These would be “tow surfers,” who instead of catching waves the old-fashioned way — by paddling — are catapulted onto them by partners riding personal watercraft. The technique allows surfers to catch waves that were previously considered so big as to be unrideable.
FICTION: STORIES
Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East Edited by Reza Aslan
This strapping anthology gathers short stories, poems and excerpts from longer works by 20th-century writers native to the Middle East — including Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Pakistan. Editor Reza Aslan, who teaches creative writing at the University of California Riverside, has chosen some names that are, or ought to be, familiar to serious readers in the West: Nobel Prize- winners Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, along with Khalil Gibran and Yasir Kemal.
But among the finds (at least to this reader) is Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962), a Turk represented by a smart, sensitive excerpt from one of his novels, “A Mind at Peace.”
In a scene about a crowd disembarking from a ferry, Tanpinar captures the dynamic of a marriage. Adile, the wife, “could walk only a short distance on the street without leaning on her husband. For her, in all probability, one of the sound ways of fully exploiting the resource known as a husband was to have him carry her, if only partially, while they were out and about.”
Elsewhere in the same selection, a character grouses about Westerners who, in writing about Turks, remind them they are “wandering on the periphery of life. A Westerner only satisfies us when he happens to remind us that we’re citizens of the world.”
NONFICTION: HISTORY
The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers
Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse lived fast, died young and left a good-looking corpse. The Oglala war chief nearly wiped out Gen. George Crook, who led the Black Hills and Yellowstone Expeditionary Force meant to drive the Sioux from the Black Hills and settled instead for killing Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25 and 26 in 1876.
Thomas Powers sets up the story as a tragic drama played out between Crazy Horse, the heroic and implacable Indian leader; Crook, the antagonist with a flaw — a few of them actually; Frank Grouard, the ethnically vague, self-promoting scout; Little Big Man, the friend who betrayed the chief; and jealous rival chiefs like Red Cloud and Spotted Tail.
Fate hangs over the book’s pages. Powers shows Crook at his worst. Unable to best Crazy Horse in battle, he lures the chief to Camp Robinson, where he is murdered in a mystifying storm of deceit on the part of Crook, jealousy and frustration among his Sioux allies, and a series of simple blunders. One can’t help feel after reading Powers’ account that Crazy Horse was fated to die that day.
As the narrative unfolds, Crazy Horse emerges from the pages as he must have to those who wanted his head: as a mystery, a rumor, someone sighted from a distance. It is not known exactly how old he was — born circa 1840 — or how he got his great name (either from his father or from a vision), or even how he felt about all the bloodshed. Powers leaves one to speculate: If Crook’s sin was pride, did Crazy Horse share that tragic flaw? Was his decision to fight Americans a calculated political decision? Or was fighting such a way of life on the plains that it was impossible for him to imagine an alternative?
In such a time of rapid, cataclysmic change, it would have been easy for an author to take sides. In some ways Powers’ decision to withhold judgment is a wonderful thing, but in his quest for balance he glosses over the fact that, while Crook might have been fighting for his pride and his command, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Red Cloud were fighting for their lives.
Crook’s defeat would have spelled the end of his career; Crazy Horse’s defeat was the end of an age.
