NONFICTION: HISTORY
The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum
Other than pulp Westerns, few books deserve the appellation “rip-roaring” anymore, but Howard Blum’s “The Floor of Heaven” is one of them. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, Blum has told with flair the true story of three men whose paths crossed in the Klondike, where the last great North American gold rush took place, in the late 1890s. The reader has to turn more than 300 pages before the author assembles his trio — a con artist, a Pinkerton detective and a prospector — on the same stage.
But no matter. Their separate back stories are highly dramatic — more so, in fact, than their ultimate convergence. The con man, Jefferson Smith, was known to almost everyone as “Soapy” because of his trademark scam, auctioning off bars of soap that he claimed may — but more likely did not — have a bank note inside the wrapper. Though the soap game might seem almost charming, Soapy and his crew also specialized in armed robbery and wholesale takeovers of frontier towns.
Charlie Siringo, the Pinkerton man, had the born detective’s ability to imagine himself into the crooked mind. In a long and skillfully told set piece, he goes undercover at a gold mine near Juneau to catch inside-job thieves.
Prospector George Carmack’s past was tamer but almost as riveting. He admired Native American ways to the point of living among the Taglish tribe. Not only did his discovery of gold along Bonanza Creek, in the Klondike country of Yukon Territory, set off a rush; it also threatened to rekindle in him the racism insisted upon by the larger culture.
Soapy goes to the Klondike because where gold and prospectors abound, so do marks. Siringo heads there because a member of the Juneau gang has escaped from jail and is reputed to be hiding somewhere in the vicinity. Carmack is still hanging around, worried about getting his $240,000 cache of gold safely out of the backcountry. Soapy plans to rob him; Siringo decides to take time out from his manhunt to make good on a debt he owes Carmack, who once saved him from being gravely injured; and the climax comes swiftly. It’s not Blum’s fault that this climax is a bit of a fizzle — he has facts to adhere to, after all.
And the three men’s paths to their common destination are so full of incident (along with cameos by the likes of Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid) that the placid ending hardly matters.
NONFICTION: MEMOIR
Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso
“Can I play with you?” 7-year-old Margaux Fragoso asked. “Of course,” answered a 51-year-old man named Peter Curran.
This chance meeting at a New Jersey community pool segued into a playdate, chaperoned by Margaux’s mother, at Curran’s house, a retreat teeming with exotic plants and animals where Margaux fell slowly and deeply under his spell, and he under hers.
In her memoir “Tiger, Tiger,” Fragoso pulls back the cloak of secrecy that nurtured a 15-year relationship, stretching from her childhood until Curran committed suicide. This isn’t a clearly defined tale of victim versus predator, for the power in their relationship often shifted. At Curran’s urging, the friendship turned sexual when she was 8, and Fragoso at times behaved like a jealous girlfriend, fretting about Curran spending time with his female housemate. She worried that he’d been intimate with other young girls, especially the foster child whose pictures he displayed in his room.
Told in a voice that combines childlike wonder with grown-up wisdom, “Tiger, Tiger” shows just how easily pedophiles can slip into children’s and families’ lives: “She will die if you try separating her from Peter,” Fragoso’s mother once told her husband, noting how depressed the girl was when they were kept apart. While at times her parents suspected the worst, they somehow managed to look the other way. Curran reassured the girl that society simply didn’t understand their love.
Fragoso manages to tell a disturbing story beautifully, leading readers into the secret world she inhabited for decades and even inspiring a modicum of sympathy for the man who manipulated and abused her. Hoping for some closure and healing — and perhaps to issue a warning — Fragoso knows she had no choice but to speak up. “Secrets are what allowed Peter’s world to flourish,” she writes in her afterword. “Silence and denial are exactly the forces that all pedophiles rely on so their true motives can remain hidden.”
NONFICTION: ECOLOGY
World Without Fish by Mark Kurlansky
“World Without Fish” is a beautiful book about a grim situation.
Artist Frank Stockton graces it with lovely, full-page illustrations of undersea life and charming drawings for “The Story of Kram and Ailat,” a father- daughter tale told in comic- book-style panels throughout the book.
Mark Kurlansky, best-selling nonfiction author (“Cod and Salt”) and former commercial fisherman, skillfully tells the all-too-true story of the urgent state to which overfishing, pollution and global warming have brought the oceans: They are in mortal danger, and that means we are, too.
“World Without Fish” is intended for kids age 9 and up, and Kurlansky does a splendid job explaining the importance of biodiversity — and the importance of realizing that humans are part of nature, not apart from it. Everything is connected, which means not only that our actions always have an impact on the environment, but that when we damage the chain of life, as we are doing in the oceans, we put ourselves at risk too.
He offers a concise history of the fishing industry and outlines how industrialization and technology dramatically altered the balance between humans and the seas we harvest. He relates overfishing disaster stories like the fates of the orange roughy and the Chilean sea bass, the long-lasting destruction caused by oil spills and islands of floating plastic garbage, the huge impact of melting glaciers that change the salt content of seawater.
But he doesn’t just tell this story to depress kids. “World Without Fish” also explains that there is no single, simple solution to this problem (even halting all fishing wouldn’t do it), but that there are things everyone, including kids, can do to turn the tide. The book offers a chapter of specific actions, from helping your family make sustainable choices at the seafood counter to joining environmental groups.
