B6
B
KLMNO Book World SOCIETY REVIEW BY LOUIS BAYARD
tremble sometimes imagining a Bill Bryson book coming to life and walking among us. So rabidly know-it-all! Facts dripping from every fang! Anecdotes oozing from its hideous ululating tongue! “Fearful place, that Centralia. Fear, of course, being a derivation of the Old English ‘faeran,’ and have you ever noticed that we tell a lie but the truth? And that forks have four tines and not three? A number, by the way, that is roughly a hun- dred-billionth the number of proteins that would fit in a drop of ink. Although the history of ink isn’t nearly as interesting as the history of cement.... ” Make . . . it . . . stop. And then explain why the experience of reading a Bill Bryson book is something you don’t want to stop — a pip and a spree and, almost incidentally, a serious educa- tion. And never tiresome, for Bryson has the gift of being the student and not the tutor. His books follow the natural wave patterns of his own curiosity, but they an- swer the questions that have always, or maybe never, been rustling at the back of your brain — why the hell are there four tines on a fork? — and the whole effect is so smooth and amber-liquored you swal- low it straight down and, in your tipsilated condition, think: “This is the book I would write. If I had Bill Bryson’s wit and epi- grammatic suavity and his ability to make each datum ripple seamlessly into the next. If, in short, I were Bill Bryson.” But there’s just one, and he’s busy. Es-
sayist and explicator, author of the best- selling “A Walk in the Woods” (about hik- ing the Appalachian Trail, back when that had an innocent connotation) and a host of books on language and science and travel. American by birth, British by incli- nation, he lives now in a 150-year-old rec- tory in Norfolk, England, that reeks of his- tory. Except, according to his newest book, every home comes with the same smell. “Whatever happens in the world — what- ever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over — eventually winds up, in one way or another, in your house.... Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.”
And so he strolls from kitchen to cellar, from garden to nursery, the better to show us how Western civilization (England, in particular) created domesticity — how houses became homes and people went about the fraught business of “getting comfortable.” A quest that, from the very
Evolution of a human habitat I
AT HOME A Short History of Private Life By Bill Bryson Doubleday. 497 pp. $28.95
day will have more bloodshed, suffering and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.... An individual rat hasn’t got great pros- pects in life, but his family is effectively in- eradicable.” Bryson on the Eiffel Tower: “Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materi- ally obsolescent and gloriously pointless all at the same time.” Sweetly, sweetly flows the trivia. The
largest source of animal protein in the Middle Ages? Smoked herring. The only two creatures that can’t make their own Vitamin C? Humans and guinea pigs. The most common cause of accidental death (after car wrecks)? Stairs. The reason smallpox got its name? To distinguish it from the “great pox” of syphilis. By now, perhaps, you feel that dreaded
Fact Monster pulsing in your brain, itch- ing to be heard. “Limpets,” it wants to cry, “take more energy to chew than they re- turn in the form of nutrition!” Bryson does cater to this particular pathology — an earlier volume promised us “A Short History of Nearly Everything” — but the angel in this case is in the details, the hu- man details, which suggest that even the neatest narrative can’t assimilate every mystery. I give you Augustus Pitt Rivers, the sur-
ly 19th-century archaeologist who insist- ed, against societal taboo, that both he and his reluctant wife should be cremat- ed. “Damn it, woman,” he assured her, “you shall burn.” (She outlived him and was peacefully buried.) Eccentric Jazz Age architect Addison Mizner used quicklime and shellac to age some leather chairs at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, never guessing that the body heat of the club’s guests would turn the shellac to glue. “I spent the whole night,” one waiter groused, “pulling dames out of those god- dam chairs.”
And give a thought, finally, to Thomas CHERYL WARRICK
start, was compromised by the exigencies of survival. The average pre-industrial house, with its “fabulously combustible” straw beds and thatched roofs, could go up in flames at any moment. Lighting in cities such as London was so poor that 18th-century author James Boswell could have sex, unobserved, in the middle of Westminster Bridge. Carpets, curtains, and upholstered and embroidered furni- ture didn’t settle in until after 1750, and
household staples such as the paper clip, zipper, safety pin and mousetrap weren’t invented until the late 19th century. Yes, the road from the prehistoric villag- es of Catalhöyük and Skara Brae to the condo and gated development is long and rough, and pocked with contingency. Sep- arate dining rooms came into being only because hostesses needed to protect their upholstery from food stains. The brass bed? Its initial appeal was that it was
thought to be impervious to bedbugs. Bathing, for more than a millennium, was eschewed as anti-hygienic. “By the eigh- teenth century,” Bryson writes, “the most reliable way to get a bath was to be in- sane.” Devotees of popular history will have met some of these stories in the work of Liza Picard, Witold Rybczynski, Daniel Boorstin and others, but it’s hard to imag- ine a better synthesizer than Bryson, or a pithier aphorist. “Nothing you touch to-
Watson, the lab assistant on the other end of Alexander Graham Bell’s immortal (and quite possibly apocryphal) phone call: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” This same Mr. Watson got wealthy off AT&T stock, earned a geology degree from MIT, started a shipyard, converted first to Islam and then to communism be- fore moving at last to England, where he became a Shakespearean actor, good enough to play at Stratford-upon-Avon. He died, Bryson tells us, “contented and rich, at his winter home on Pass-Grille Key, Florida, just shy of his eighty-first birthday in 1934.”
bookworld@washpost.com Louis Bayard is a novelist and reviewer.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2010
ENVIRONMENT REVIEW BY ANN CUMMINS Uranium stalks the desert
YELLOW DIRT An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed By Judy Pasternak Free Press. 317 pp. $26
3 books on language
Environmentalists are alarmed by the rapid decline of biodiversity over the past century, with species becoming extinct at a rate that outpaces sci- ence’s ability to discover, let alone study, them. The same is true of languag- es the world over. A 2007 study by the Living Tongues Institute for Endan- gered Languages painted a dire picture, identifying five “hot spots” (eastern Siberia, northern Australia, central South America, Oklahoma and the Pacif- ic Northwest) where languages are vanishing at a pace that outstrips that of species extinction. So what’s to blame? Colonialism, technology, industrial- ization, the (gulp) English language itself? All of them, actually.
1
The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages, by K. David Harrison (National Geo- graphic, $27). A linguist at Swarth- more College, K. David Harrison helped conduct that 2007 survey. This chronicle is as much an hom- age to noble elders who often strug- gle to surmount indifference in their own communities as it is an op-ed by the author, who sounds the alarm among a skeptical public, and even other scientists, about the incalculable loss posed by a lan- guage’s extinction.
2
The English Is Coming! How One Language Is Sweeping
the World, by Leslie Dunton-Down- er (Touchstone, $24). Fascinated since childhood by words (especial- ly compound ones), the author aims to decipher something much more complex: the entire English lan- guage. Today, with more nonnative speakers than native ones, English has become the world’s lingua fran- ca, the preferred choice in enter- tainment, science, business and (much to the chagrin of the French)
diplomacy. We’re given a tour of English’s remarkable rise from its Anglo-Saxon roots through the Ren- aissance (and all the words Shake- speare added to the lexicon) to modern English and the 21st centu- ry’s texting variety. Chockablock with facts, figures and interesting tidbits, this is no stodgy history les- son.
3
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks
Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher (Metropolitan, $28). The thrust of this title, that lan- guage does indeed mirror culture, is one of the arguments that linguist Harrison makes for preserving lan- guage diversity. Guy Deutscher con- fidently asserts that a language in- fluences how its users perceive the world. The book is a thrilling and challenging ride, and in the end you may find yourself agreeing with Frenchman Étienne de Condillac that “each language expresses the character of the people who speak it.”
— Christopher Schoppa
schoppac@washpost.com
I
first heard about radiation poison- ing on the Navajo Reservation in the late 1960s. I was a teenager living on the reservation. My father was one of the white millers employed by the
Vanadium Corporation of America (VCA) to run the uranium mill in Shiprock, N.M. News of health disasters came to me as ru- mors at school: “They say a herd of sheep drank from the river and died. They say miners at Red Mountain are getting sick.” Over the next several decades rumor gave way to evidence of serious health prob- lems among uranium miners, their fami- lies, the livestock and the land. In her dis- turbing and illuminating “Yellow Dirt,” Judy Pasternak evokes the magnitude of a nuclear disaster that continues to re- verberate. Pasternak locates ground zero in Cane
Valley, 30 miles northeast of Arizona’s gor- geous red rock country, Monument Valley. Prospectors had been eying the mineral- rich reservation since the early 1920s, but it wasn’t until 1938 that Congress passed a law giving the Navajo tribal council au- thority to issue leases. The following year, Franklin Roosevelt pledged U.S. material support, his “arsenal of democracy,” to the allies in the war effort against Germany. Specifically, Roosevelt was interested in developing a domestic supply of carnotite, which yields uranium and vanadium. Va- nadium is a steel-hardening agent used for armor-plating in warplanes and weaponry. The VCA immediately took steps to help build the arsenal, contracting with the gov- ernment and aggressively seeking mining rights on Indian land. In August 1942, the company sealed a deal to mine carnotite in Cane Valley; the agreement stipulated that the VCA must employ Navajo miners. There’s nothing clinical or dry about
“Yellow Dirt.” While Pasternak cites a wide array of specialists in fields ranging from
geology to nuclear physics, the story un- folds like true crime, where real-life he- roes and villains play dynamic roles in a drama that escalates page by page. Pas- ternak briefly traces historical begin- nings, from Marie Curie’s discovery of ra- dium to the Manhattan Project’s work with plutonium, the bombing of Japan and the birth of Harry Truman’s postwar baby, the Atomic Energy Commission. She describes how the AEC partnered with U.S. mining companies to fuel the Cold War.
Culling from oral histories and inter-
views to tell the story of the native people, the author tracks the U.S. nuclear industry as it affected generations in Cane Valley. From the 1920s, Navajo patriarch Adakai presided over the valley. Pasternak beauti- fully evokes his family’s rugged agrarian lifestyle raising sheep in an austere desert.
low uranium to pose a distinct peril of its own; he would not let cancer be an issue.” The arms race gave the government a
powerful motivation to speed ahead, and the VCA had carte blanche to exploit re- sources on the reservation. “Exploit” is the appropriate word here. The author details deep cultural and language gaps as well as geographical isolation that allowed the company to cut corners and put the Nava- jo miners at great risk. The AEC eventual- ly raised safety standards, but neither it nor the VCA effectively educated the non- English-speaking miners about health hazards in yellow dirt, the tailings that piled up all over Indian land. After the in- dustry collapsed in 1969, the piles re- mained for several years, and Cane Valley residents recycled the dirt, using it to make adobe bricks and radioactive hous- ing, in which they lived for decades.
“Definite radiation hazards exist in all the
plants now operating.” Atomic Energy Commission inspector Ralph Batie in 1949
Adakai was only a couple of decades re- moved from the “Long Walk” generation, which had been subjugated and exiled dur- ing the Lincoln administration. Having no reason to trust white people, he refused to cooperate when VCA employees made ini- tial inquiries about yellow rocks in Cane Valley. But his son Luke Yazzie, motivated by patriotism and his family’s poverty, was lured by a promised finder’s fee and showed them the rocks. The crime story in “Yellow Dirt” devel- ops around early tensions within the AEC. Pasternak quotes AEC safety inspector Ralph Batie telling a Denver Post reporter in 1949: “Definite radiation hazards exist in all the plants now operating.” Batie was ordered to “keep your mouth shut.” Jesse Johnson, the liaison between Washington and the mining companies, cut Batie’s travel budget and strong-armed him into transferring out of the area. Pasternak writes that “Johnson simply would not al-
This crime story builds to a powerful climax: chilling statistical evidence for an epidemic of cancer, birth defects and oth- er devastating fallout from uranium min- ing on the reservation. Pasternak is a compelling writer, though she can seem biased, as when she calls Johnson “an ambitious man who liked to feel important.” Declarations like this are gratuitous in a book so compre- hensive and well-told that readers can draw their own conclusions. Eye-opening and riveting, “Yellow Dirt” gives a sobering glimpse into our atomic past and adds a critical voice to the debate about resurrecting America’s nuclear in- dustry.
bookworld@washpost.com Ann Cummins is the author of a novel,
“Yellowcake,” and curator of “Southwest Book Reviews” for NPR affiliate KNAU in Flagstaff, Ariz.
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