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Book World
ANATOMY REVIEW BY TROY JOLLIMORE
What points, wags, tickles and talks?
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SUNDAY,MAY 16, 2010
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TRUE CRIME
FINDING CHANDRA A True Washington Murder Mystery
By Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz Scribner. 287 pp. $26
The frenzy over the 2001 disap- pearance of Chandra Levy cooled twice, first because of the Sept. 11 attacks, then because attention was diverted to the sniper murders throughout the Washington region. Police never arrested prime suspect Gary Condit, the congressman with whom Levy had been having an af- fair, and the case went cold. But in 2007, editors at The Wash-
ington Post decided to revisit the case because they “wondered why the murder had never been solved, whether the homicide investigation had been mishandled, and if anyone would ever stand trial for the crime.” They assigned the story to reporters Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz. Even if Horwitz and Higham were to fail to solve the case, their editors believed that at minimum, a reinvestigation would produce a law enforcement procedural that would both grip and
hat is more familiar than one’s own fingers, and what is more apt to be taken for granted? They are always there, those modest, unde- manding servants, at our beck and call; and except
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when something has gone wrong — a scratch, a sprain — they call little attention to themselves. Indeed, they seem always to be pointing at some- thing other, always directing our attention else- where. But fingers are in their own right quite fascinat-
ing. If you don’t believe me, Angus Trumble’s “The Finger” is here to convince you. An art historian and curator, Trumble has already shown in his previous book, “A Brief History of the Smile,” his ability to build an enjoyably idiosyncratic mis- cellany of facts and observations around a deeply ordinary but habitually neglected element of hu- man life. “The Finger” moves beyond the oral fixations of
“The Smile” and boldly into the digital realm. We frequently identify people by their smiles and the rest of their faces, but hands, too, are highly indi- vidual and highly expressive. We forget how much communication takes place through our hands, both through written language (you are, right now, reading what my fingers tapped out) and through signs and gestures. The thumbs-up, the V of “peace,” the raised “just hold on one minute” in-
BIGSTOCKPHOTO
Read my hands: T-h-e f-i-n-g-e-r
dex finger, the wave of greeting or goodbye, and of course the expression of raw hostility and contempt known simply as “the finger” — all these are part of your repertoire and mine. And they are just the rudiments: Fingers are capable of learning and articulat- ing entire languages, of which the sign language used by the deaf is only the most familiar example. As Trum- ble writes, human beings have always been prepared to let their fingers do the talking: “There have always been sign lan-
guages for the benefit of the deaf and mute, but sometimes there have been ritual bans on speech — temporary or even occasionally permanent — that made species of gesture not only nec- essary but indispensable. Not all of them were monastic in nature; married Arme- nian women in the Caucasus were prevented by convention from speaking to their husbands’ male relatives, and solved the problem by adopt- ing a convenient language of gesture.” In 10th- century Cluny, meanwhile, sign language defeat- ed the purpose of the vow of silence: “It soon emerged that some monks using the in-house sign language were as chatty, garrulous, and prone to gossip as they would have been if they were al- lowed to speak.”
THE FINGER A Handbook
By Angus Trumble Farrar Straus Giroux 300 pp. $28
As an art historian, Trumble is es- pecially intrigued by fingers as objects of beauty, including the perpetual quest for the fabled and elusive “fil- bert nail,” and by their depiction in art. He devotes an entire chapter to gloves and another to nail polish. The latter includes several quite enter- taining, if also slightly disturbing, pages detailing a certain “lively ex- change of letters to the editor of The [London] Times in August 1937,” set off by one letter-writer’s contention that the use of nail polish had an inex- tricably racial element, the desire to “conceal the traces of black blood that otherwise would be discernible there.” If fingers can be works of art in themselves — a thought encouraged
by a cosmetics industry whose magnitude and in- fluence, as Trumble points out, have expanded ex- ponentially in recent decades — they are all the more interesting when they appear in works of art. The most famous and obvious example, per- haps, would be the fingertip touch, at once inti- mate and distant, that unites Adam and God on Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. More unexpected and intriguing, though, is Trumble’s meditation on the “carefully drawn fingers” in Pi- casso’s Guernica:
“In all the principal figures . . . the forms of their carefully sexualized bodies, with armpits and nipples and veins and toenails, are distorted almost to the fullest extent possible without los- ing track of what they are doing. But look at all those hands and stubby fingers, at least twelve sets. With grim determination, Picasso shows us the limpness of a dead baby’s fingers against the horrifying eloquence of the mother’s free hand, the index finger somehow quietly curling toward the thumb in the manner one occasionally sees in a person overcome by hysteria — creating in the process an almost perversely correct enumeration of each set of digits.” Not all of Trumble’s writing rises to this level; some of the detailed anatomical discussions, for instance, come across as rather dry. And the book seems to simply run out of steam and stop, rather than building to a satisfying conclusion. But if these are the book’s flaws, they can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with some to spare. On the whole, “The Finger” is a deft, enjoyable and of- ten provocative investigation into some over- looked and interrelated aspects of human experi- ence.
bookworld@washpost.com
Troy Jollimore is the author of “Tom Thomson in
Purgatory,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry for 2006.
BIOGRAPHY
PARALLEL WORLDS The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin
By Adele Logan Alexander Univ. of Virginia. 375 pp. $29.95
SCREEN GRAB FROM LEVY FAMILY HOME MOVIES
educate readers. They were right on both counts.
“Finding Chandra,” an expanded version of a series that ran in the paper in 2008, is a well-reported, well-written chronicle of a botched criminal investigation and its dis- turbing aftermath. And Higham and Horwitz do seem to have solved the case. About a year after Levy disap- peared, a hiker in Rock Creek Park spotted her remains. That portion of the park had been the site of previ-
ous violent assaults by Ingmar Ada- lid Guandique, an El Salvadoran im- migrant who eventually went to pris- on for two of the attacks. Some police officials and prosecutors be- lieved Guandique also assaulted and killed Levy. Those in charge of the investigation continued to focus on Condit. The case is still not closed, but Higham and Horwitz strongly suggest that Guandique killed Levy.
—Steve Weinberg
bookworld@washpost.com
One of the few African Ameri- cans in the U.S. foreign service, William Henry Hunt began his dip- lomatic career in 1897 as an aide to Mifflin Wistar Gibbs and, before retiring in 1932, served in Mada- gascar, France, Guadeloupe and Liberia. Gibbs’s daughter Ida mar- ried Hunt in 1904, followed him overseas and took advantage of the more liberal racial climate she encountered to become an out- spoken advocate for racial and gender equality.
Hunt’s story as a self-made man is as improbable as Gibbs’s family background. Born into slav- ery in Tennessee in 1863, Hunt told fantastic tales about his hard- knocks youth. But the truth was amazing enough. In 1889, at the age of 26, he passed himself off as a 20-year-old, found a patron and enrolled at Lawrence Acad- emy in Massachusetts. He then
became one of three African American students at Williams College. He left before graduating and soon attached his fortunes to Ida Gibbs, whom he’d met in his travels. She in turn persuaded her diplomat father to take Hunt on as his protégé. And just like that, Billy Hunt morphed into William Henry Hunt, ready to perform on the world stage. Gibbs came from African Ameri- can aristocracy. Her father worked for Frederick Douglass, migrated west as part of the Cali- fornia Gold Rush and founded the state’s only African American newspaper. He was later a lawyer, businessman and active Republi- can in Arkansas. His career peaked when President William McKinley appointed him consul to Tamatave, Madagascar. Ida (born in 1862) grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, where she followed her school-
teacher mother to Oberlin Col- lege, a mother-daughter achieve- ment that surely ranks as a first in the history of African American education. Fluent in French and a long-time friend of W. E. B. Du Bois, she helped organize his Pan- African Congresses in Europe in the 1910s and ’20s, and at the 1923 London conference she de- livered a talk on “The Colored Rac- es and the League of Nations.” Adele Logan Alexander, a pro-
fessor of history at George Wash- ington University and a cousin of the Gibbs-Hunt family, has her eye on larger targets than Ida and Wil- liam. She wants to augment the many accounts of African Ameri- can privations during the Jim Crow era and to “refute prevalent perceptions that Negroes were ig- norant of or [uninterested] in international affairs.” But in the effort to prove that the Hunts were not alone in either their learning or their internationalist aspirations, she often wanders from her narrative core, distract- ing the reader with accounts of other people’s achievements that make it hard to follow the Hunts’ lives. And an unusual footnoting practice that provides specific notes for some facts, nonspecific sources for others and none at all for some stories of interest makes it difficult to use this book as a de- finitive source.
— Martha A. Sandweiss
bookworld@washpost.com
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