UNSEEN AMERICA
3 Book World SUMMER READING ISSUE KRISTIN LENZ TRAVEL REVIEW BY TAHIR SHAH
Where the stars at night are big and bright
FICTION
5 3 Michael Dirda reviews Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay
PLUS
4 3 Elinor Lipman on Holy Water, by James P. Othmer
4 3 Donna Rifkind on The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer
123 Dennis Drabelle and Anna Mundow on hot summer thrillers.
POLITICS
6&7 3 Prepare for a civil war this summer — in books, with incendiery titles coming from both right (Newt Gingrich) and left (Markos Moulitsas). Steven Levingston plays referee.
A CHILDREN’S
10 3 Kristi Jemtegaard reviews ABC picture books PLUS
10 3 Mary Quattlebaum on young adult fi ction
11 3 Abby McGanney Nolan on kids’ nonfi ction
ALSO INSIDE
9 3The Writing Life: On being a presidential speechwriter, by Ted Widmer
11 3Audio Books: Good listening for summer road trips, by Katherine A. Powers
ON THE COVER
Izhar Cohen is an illustrator living in Paris. His work has been published in The Finacial Times, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, TIME and others.
NONFICTION
8 3 Kevin Starr reviews Colossus: Hoover Dam, by Michael Hiltzik PLUS
2 3 Sean Callahan on World Cup soccer
3 3 Tahir Shah on The Last Empty Places, by Peter Stark
BOOK WORLD STAFF
EDITOR Rachel Shea DEPUTY EDITOR Ron Charles
SENIOR EDITOR Steven Levingston
ART DIRECTOR Kristin Lenz, Stephanie Beard BOOK CRITIC Jonathan Yardley
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Dennis Drabelle
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Christopher Schoppa EDITORIAL AIDE Stephen Lowman
LOCAL AND NATIONAL ADVERTISING SALES Kathryn Whitener 202.334.6171 AND Mike Towle 202.334.7135
© THE WASHINGTON POST ALL RIGHTS RESERVE VOLUME 38, NUMBER 2 Reach us at
bookworld@washpost.com
s a travel writer, I have spent years crisscrossing the globe in search of the fabulous, the rare and the exotic. Mine has been a life-long quest for the
bizarre, and my rule of thumb has been “If it ain’t crazy as hell, leave it out.” But time and travel are great levelers. Hack through a few jungles, stagger across three or four deserts, climb some mountains, sleep in yurts and tents and at least one wretched west African brothel, and you begin to crave something else. Some- thing new. It’s a deep-down craving, the kind pregnant women get when they feel they have to chew on dirt. It’s almost primeval . . . the craving for the ordinary. It’s a desire that is satisfied by Peter Stark’s new book, “The Last Empty Places.”
Europe — which is full to the point of bursting with people, towns and cities — there’s something deliciously refreshing about rambling through the United States in search of emptiness. I often find myself imagining that it, too, will be somehow overloaded. But it isn’t. The United States is a vast, mesmerizing can- vas of nature, a land that in many ways is as untamed now as it was in the times of the pioneers. It’s just a matter of going in search of it.
Stark is a writer and a journalist who grew up in an old log cabin in the Wis- consin woods. After 40 years of traveling the world and writing about what he has seen, it seems right and proper that he turn his at- tention to his homeland. From the start of his book, there’s a sense that it’s about coming home, Stark reacquainting him- self with a blissful childhood, while somehow pitting himself against urban sprawl and the claustrophobic suffoca- tion of the virtual world. He practices gentle observation the low-tech way. Yet the book does begin with some high-tech thinking. Taking advice from a friend, Stark got himself a copy of the “Nighttime Map of the United States,” a satellite shot showing population densi- ties by electric lights across the country. Cross-referencing this with his Rand McNally road map, he plotted key target zones, areas of emptiness that somehow sang out to him. Uninterested in nation- al parks (or in Alaska), Stark was more concerned with the realm of the pio- neers, the American naturalists and thinkers who influenced his life: men like Thoreau, Emerson and that Scot- tish-born champion of the wilderness, John Muir. Over the next two-and-a-half years, Stark roamed and roamed, lured by the blank gaps in northern Maine and western Pennsylvania, in southeastern Oregon and the New Mexican desert. To someone who grew up largely in
THE LAST EMPTY PLACES A Past and Present Journey Through the Blank Spots on the American Map By Peter Stark Ballantine. 352 pp. $26
I must admit that, when I read that Stark was dragging his wife and two kids along, at least part of the way, I raised one eyebrow and then the other. “Sounds like a trav- el writer trying to sell us a family vacation,” I said to myself. But after pushing my way through the prologue (oh, how I dislike prologues), I found myself in the warm, wonderful underbelly of Pe- ter Stark’s world. It’s a realm of considerable erudition, one that’s observed with a re- porter’s eye for detail — a re- porter of the old school, who knows never to waste a syl- lable, let alone a word. There’s plenty of history, the kind that’s nailed firmly to places and the people he encounters. There’s delicious description, too, such as that of a tiny Oregon village called Fields, “It had that oasis look to it — a distant, yellow-green island of cotton- wood trees and a huge brownish valley rimmed by dry mountains.”
But the most touching thing about this book is the way Stark detours us away from the world we’ve all been sold — the shopping malls and the theme parks, the gridlock, the cities and the desperate homogeneity of it all. With ir- resistible charm he reminds us that America is still a wild and vibrant mis- cellany of nature, a one-of-a-kind place. With time I can imagine “The Last
Empty Places” becoming required read- ing in schools. And I hope it does. It’s a book that the early American naturalists and the pioneers before them would be proud of, one that carves through the smoke screen of mass culture, remind- ing us of the true essence of America.
Tahir Shah is the author of "The Caliph’s House" and "In Arabian Nights." He lives in Casablanca.
THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOK WORLD • SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
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