The title of this book by best-selling author and noted American-with-a-British-accent Bill Bryson might be amended to A Short History of Science. While Bryson does indeed investigate everything from the Big Bang down to the machinations of mitochondrial DNA and all stops in between, alongside everything are the stories of the men and women who have brought this knowledge to light. Primarily, in fact, what we have is a short history of modern science, with most of the science coming from no earlier than the mid-17th century.

In any event Bryson’s Short History is a very enjoyable book, wherein he presents his complex subjects in a manner readable to the lay person (i.e., me), without dumbing anything down. Early in the book he states that much of science deals with figures both infinitely large and infinitesimally small, and that his aim is to deliver it to the reader in a digestible way, spelling things out rather than using scientific notation whenever possible, and using analogies rather than bald numbers (Bryson thankfully never uses “football fields” as a unit of measurement, but he does tell you for example that if you wove all the DNA in a single cell out in one continuous thread it would stretch from the Earth to the Moon multiple times).

As Bryson recounts the stories of various scientific discoveries, he manages to include fascinating trivia or entertaining stories about the scientists who made the discoveries, often including amusing coincidences along the way. In describing the original discovery of dinosaur bones and fossils, we’re also told the etymology of the vine wisteria, and the origin of the tongue-twister “She sells seashells by the sea shore.” In the chapter on water, we learn that the surface of the Pacific Ocean is 1.5 feet higher on its western shore, due to the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation — for some reason this factoid thrills me to the point of near queasiness. It is by means such as these (in addition to his sense of humor and overall skill as a writer) that Bryson can keep your interest in sometimes dry or hard to fathom concepts for nearly 500 pages.

A Short History is a recommended read for anyone with even a casual interest in…well, anything. Read it to learn about cavemen, bacteria, plate tectonics, quantum gobbledygook, and how Isaac Newton once stuck a needle in his eye “just to see what would happen.” And don’t be frightened off by the multiple chapters about how everything from microbes to asteroids to water to earthquakes are definitely going to kill you, because it’s nothing short of a statistical anomaly that you made it this far in the first place, so just relax and enjoy yourself. SCIENCE!

It is perhaps a Freudian slip that when I typed the title of the book to begin this review, I mistakenly typed it as The Waspshot Chronicle. Maybe I’m being too harsh on what is at the end of the day a rich and interesting book, which as the title says chronicles the lives of a well-to-do family in mid-20th century rural New England. While the characters themselves are something less than likeable (likewise the setting, belying the Norman Rockwell stereotype I hold of the place), Cheever’s writing is masterfully wrought and thoroughly engaging.

The first hundred or so pages are fairly prosaic as the author uses plenty of evocative but not overdone imagery and apt metaphor to place the setting and the characters in the reader’s mind. Cheever’s dialogue is most often indirect, but when he uses direct quotes they are in dialect that feels spot on and unobtrusive. We meet the oddball family and become involved in the gradually thickening plot.

In part two Cheever turns suddenly to more experimental techniques, such as writing in the second person or delivering whole chapters’ worth of excerpts of the main character Leander’s “autobiography or confession,” written in a difficult-to-read staccato shorthand. With the more challenging writing the plot also becomes more involved, and during this part of the book we’re made to follow three or four separate plot lines as Leander’s sons Moses and Coverly leave home to succeed in the world and Leander himself writes his book and contends with his wealthy and mildly hateful cousin Honora (the characters’ names are for the most part more interesting than they are themselves).

Nearly every character comes across in a bad light, seen through the lens of a twisted sexual politics — young men are lecherous rapists, young women are whores, old men are henpecked and emasculated by the bitter old women in their lives, who are all caricatures of Miss Havisham — though there are one or two exceptions, principally among the youth, who seem to retain some optimism and essential goodness (or at least some complexity).

I would recommend this book for the beauty of Cheever’s writing alone, though despite my early wariness in the setting and characters it was on the whole enjoyable. As is expected with Heavy Family Dramas there is some tragedy, but there are also some funny scenes, as when a country bumpkin in the big city sputteringly tries his first martini cocktail, or when a young man and his future bride attempt early consummation under the nose of her Havishammy guardian. Cheever does a fantastic job of exploring the transitory nature of life (the only constant is change) and rendering everything believable without allowing it to become too dry or too silly (both of which characteristics do feature at times). And it has that rarity among fiction in any genre: a satisfying ending.

The title says it all, really, as our author the estimable Jeremy Schaap tells the story of Jesse Owens’ astounding victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

I was a little disappointed in the tone of the writing, at least through the first part of the book, which briefly recounts Owens’ childhood and in more detail his college track career. I’m familiar with Schaap as a good sports writer — one of the best in fact, and a fine successor to his widely respected father Dick Schaap — and perhaps my expectations were a little high. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. In any case there is a definite rah-rah Hallmark Card feeling to the early parts of the book, emphasized by the sometimes corny dialogue Schaap puts into the mouths of his protagonists.

Beyond feeling like I was being urged by the author to root for Owens (and honestly, why would I need such urging? Owens is an iconic figure in American and world sports history, and anyone picking up this book surely does so at least partly out of sympathy with him and a distaste for the Nazis), I got exactly what I wanted from the book, which was a detailed account of Jesse Owens qualifying for and competing at Hitler’s Olympics.

Two things piqued my interest the most while reading Triumph: one was the casual racism that pervaded American sports writing in the 1930s; the other was Owens’ unlikely friendship with German track star Luz Long.

As I mentioned earlier, Schaap got a great deal of his information from contemporary sports pages, including Grantland Rice, who I gather is a legend of American sports reporters (Bill Simmons named his new website for him, after all). Looking at the quotes pulled in this book though Rice was no less racist than any other sports writer of his day, even when praising Owens, which they all did very often. In the mid 1930s the theory of eugenics had not yet been laughably discarded, and a great topic of interest among sports enthusiasts was determining why black athletes did so well in track and field. German and American sports reporters alike took every opportunity to discuss why black athletes were so successful, with Grantland Rice frequently using the phrase “darktown parade” to refer to Owens and his fellow African-American teammates. Rice gave a sarcastic cheer when a white American won gold in a hurdle race, apparently not happy enough with the complete dominance of the US track team to that point because it had all been “our Ethiopian troops” winning all the races. The German press was less friendly, as one might expect (“If America didn’t have her black auxiliaries, where would she be in the Olympic games?”).

Apart from the sports writers, the very people who controlled the American Olympic Committee and the track and field team were themselves only a shade or two less bigoted than their Nazi competition. Avery Brundage, head of the AOC, and Deam Cromwell, the head coach of the US team, made efforts to favor white athletes in the face of the overwhelming superiority of Owens talents. Brundage actually kicked Owens off the team following the games for refusing to participate (unpaid) in an exhibition tour of Europe.

On a less depressing note, Jesse Owens formed a friendship during the games with a German track star named Luz Long, his only genuine competition apart from his American teammates (Long eventually took the silver medal in the broad jump while Owens of course won the gold). Luz, blond and statuesque and as Aryan as they come, approached Owens during the preliminary rounds and offered friendly advice while the American was in a bit of a panic after faulting on his first jump. He told Owens to relax and make his jump from a foot behind the board to avoid even the fear of faulting (the minimum distance needed to qualify was well within Owens’ ability). Later the two men would chat amiably on the stadium infield, and they even spent an evening breaking bread together in Long’s cottage at the Olympic village, sharing as intimate a conversation as can be imagined considering the language barrier. Owens talked about his upbringing in rural Alabama. Long confessed his trepidation about the direction in which his country was headed. Their unlikely friendship did endure after the games, and the two maintained a correspondence with one another, with Long signing his final letter to Owens, “Your brother, Luz.” Long was pressed into service shortly thereafter and was killed in combat in Sicily in 1943.

Schaap is not a historian, though he does an admirable job of setting the scene of mid-30s America and Germany. There are poignant anecdotes about the institutionalized racism in the United States at that time (and not just in the south), which he then shows in comparison with what was already happening to Jews (among others) in Germany.

Schaap’s real strength as a writer — his wheelhouse I might say in the spirit of the subject — is in sports writing. When the narrative centers on a sporting moment, be it a Big Ten track meet, the Olympic trials, or the Olympic games themselves — when the action is on the field, as it were — that’s when Schaap really shines. The scenes inside Berlin’s Olympic Stadium were very enjoyable to read, including descriptions of the races themselves, but also of the flag and salute etiquette during the parade of nations, and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl filming her documentary Olympia. It’s chilling to read about a race or a discus competition and then to be told that among the spectators in the stadium were included no less terrifying bogeymen than Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler. There is also one truly bizarre moment regarding Riefenstahl and an American decathlete (no spoilers).

Despite some shortcomings, Jeremy Schaap does a good job of showing who Jesse Owens was, from his college career and rise to stardom to his dominance at Hitler’s games. We get glimpses of him away from the track (he was a devoted family man who also liked to stay out late dancing) and a brief look at his life post-Olympics (not all roses and rainbows but certainly not terrible). A good book for sports fans and non-fans alike, and a fine telling of one of the most iconic moments of the 20th century.

2. The Wapshot Chronicle — John Cheever (1957) [review here]

3. A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson (2003) [review here]

4. Beyond the Blue Event Horizon — Frederik Pohl (1980)

5. From Sawdust to Stardust: The Biography of DeForest Kelley, Star Trek‘s Dr. McCoy — Terry Lee Rioux (2005)

Once I did start reading, I managed to get some pretty good books in before the year’s end. The best book I read this year was the one I just finished last night, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s examination of Dust Bowl migrant farmers. If you have never read it, do. If you have read it, read it again. I hadn’t read it since college about 15 years ago, and it is much better than I remembered; in part because I think I’m a better reader now than I was then (more practiced in critical thought and close reading, and more appreciative of well-crafted writing), and in part because it speaks directly to a lot of the things that I have been thinking heavily about lately: suffering, economic equality, cruelty, generosity, etc. It has been called communist propaganda but I think it would be more accurately described as Humanist propaganda. On top of the grand themes, Steinbeck is a master of prose, able to both construct a large and intensely believable plot and cast of characters, and stick the emotional knife into the reader and twist it to maximum effect. Most classics are classics for a reason and The Grapes of Wrath is a perfect example of this.

I am making an effort to consume more non-fiction, and while I didn’t get the 1-to-1 ratio of fiction-to-non that I’d aimed for, five of the 14 books I read were non-fic, all of which were edifying if not always entertaining. Eating Animals made me continue to look hard at what I put in my body (which currently constitutes a vegetarian diet and may ultimately end up closer to vegan…did I just write that?); 1491 and Mornings on Horseback broadened my deficient knowledge of New World/American history (I know more about the Peloponnesian War than the American Civil War, sadly); and Fear and Loathing: Campaign ’72 and Consider the Lobster helped me realize that there are great authors writing non-fiction (I knew about Hunter S. Thompson, but Lobster is the first David Foster Wallace book I’ve read, and he is a simply brilliant, gifted writer).

My first and greatest love remains fiction, specifically novels. Whether pulpy sci-fi or big meaty lit-class stuff, I love a novel, and I read some good ones this year. It turned out to be one of the first books I ever read, The Hobbit, that helped me get back into the rhythm of reading this year after that inexplicable eight-month hiatus. I normally read quite a bit of sci-fi, but this year the only thing I read from that genre was Man Plus, well-written 1970s psychedelia with a sense of humor and a sense of horror. All the Pretty Horses is top notch (though the best thing I’ve read by Cormac McCarthy is still Blood Meridian), and J.G. Ballard’s Crash is disturbing on both a psychological and a visceral level (but still worth reading!). I got a few lulz out of the Tarzan book I read (review linked below). The most disappointing books I read this year were The Thin Man and The Nigger Factory, in both cases because I expected them to be so much better.

So here’s the list for 2011. As I said I finished The Grapes of Wrath last night, and this morning I began reading Triumph, Jeremy Schaap’s book about Jesse Owens at Hitler’s Olympics, which will be the first book on my log for 2012.

1. Trout Fishing In America — Richard Brautigan (1967)

2. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again — J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)

3. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays — David Foster Wallace (2005)

4. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 — Hunter S. Thompson (1973)

5. Crash — J.G. Ballard (1973)

6. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus — Charles G. Mann (2005)

7. All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy (1992)

8. The Nigger Factory — Gil Scott-Heron (1972)

9. Man Plus — Frederik Pohl (1976)

10. The Thin Man — Dashiell Hammett (1934) [review here]

11. Eating Animals — Jonathan Safran Foer (2009)

12. Jungle Tales of Tarzan — Edgar Rice Burroughs (1919) [review here]

13. Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt — David McCullough (1981)

14. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck (1939)

Jungle Tales of Tarzan is a collection of short stories and the sixth book in the Tarzan series, but it is curiously set in between two chapters of the original novel, Tarzan of the Apes.

I needed a palate cleanser after reading something quote unquote heavy. I enjoy pulp fiction, whether it’s noir, adventure or (most often) SF or whatever, and among the unread books in my queue was this mass market paperback I’d bought last year at Powells for a buck. I’d never read any books about the famous Ape-Man, and so I thought perfect, let’s enjoy some silly adventure stories. Hitherto the only thing I knew about Tarzan was that Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller played him in the movies, and I only knew that because I’d been once or twice to the park in central Florida (read: swamp) where they were filmed.

So anyway, it turns out that Tarzan is a huge asshole.

Jungle Tales is some of the most bombastically and unintentionally funny stuff I’ve read in a while. I don’t imagine the author expected his audience to laugh much while reading his Tarzan stories, or at least not at the parts where I more than once laughed literally out loud. These stories are a treasure trove of encoded information about race, gender, and nature from the perspective of an early-20th century white American guy named Edgar Rice Burroughs. His creation Tarzan is an orphaned white English aristocrat who was raised by apes in the jungle in Africa (where in Africa? IN THE JUNGLE in Africa!), and he kills animals and black people with his hands and teeth. Tarzan loves practical jokes, and among his favorite pastimes are “baiting the blacks”, tormenting the blacks, and murdering the blacks (in this case “the blacks” are a village of native Africans, so two-dimensional and caricatured they may as well have leaped from the early scenes of the movie “King Kong” and into Burroughs’ books).

Burroughs has it that the villagers (who are cannibals, dear me! They are also very immoral and lazy, oh my!) moved into the jungle to escape the slave traders and other brutalizers in the Belgian Congo, though I read this less as his sympathy for the black Africans and more as his condemnation of European colonizers (he’s also very hard on the English aristocracy). They’ve escaped the horrors of King Leopold, but in the jungle they have to deal with lions and apes and panethers, not to mention Tarzan (the good guy, remember) who torments and tortures and kills them for sport.

In one story, called “A Jungle Joke”, Tarzan foils the villagers’ plan to catch a lion, and in the process he switches the goat they’d used as bait with their witch-doctor; when they check the lion trap the next morning they indeed find they have captured a lion, and they also find the mutilated body of the witch-doctor (hee hee!). Later, after they take the captured lion back to their village, Tarzan frees the lion in such a way that about a dozen more villagers are mauled to death and one is eaten alive while Tarzan watches from a tree and giggles. This story once again is called “A Jungle Joke” and Tarzan is the protagonist who later became a popular leading man in films and television, including Disney.

Moving past the cringe-worthy racism that soaks through every page of this book, there are other flaws and head-scratchers that are much more entertaining and less awful and depressing. For example: Tarzan learns how to read by staring at books even though he doesn’t speak English (he doesn’t even speak human). He figures out what the word “God” means (in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, as in omnipotent creator/giant beard in the sky), and goes on a quest to find God and beat him up (Tarzan is very macho).

One time, Tarzan stole tainted elephant meat from the villagers (in the process of which he shoved one of them into the stew pot for a good joke), and not knowing the meat was tainted he ate it, and then he tripped balls.

Tarzan isn’t all about killing black guys and biting animals to death. He also learns about the meaning of family and parenthood. Tarzan wants very badly to have a baby to care for, and after he realizes he can’t make one with one of his she-ape family members, he decides to steal one from the black villagers. To his credit, Tarzan realizes (eventually, after the kid is almost eaten by hyenas because of Tarzan) that the child should be with his own mother, even if she is ugly and black with gross stuff in her face.

Did I say this book made me laugh? Well, it did, but only until about halfway through. By the fifth or sixth story I stopped laughing and started wondering more or less “What the fuck?” I mean, Burroughs isn’t the worst writer ever, his language is somewhat eloquent and he really likes to use words like “thews” and “spoor”, which was amusing for a while. And the logical inconsistencies and Burroughs’ obvious and total lack of knowledge about the jungle was good for a few giggles (lions, apes, people, hyenas, elephants, panthers, gorillas and rhinoceroses all living essentially on top of one another in the jungle…lions in the jungle? Oh and Tarzan’s ape tribe have a verbal language well-developed enough to discuss concepts like God, and did I mention Tarzan learned what the word “God” meant by staring at a book for a long time?). But the laughs began to wear thin around the time Tarzan fed the outcast leper to the leper’s own pet hyenas, and I finished the book as quickly as possible, racing through the last story wherein Tarzan becomes head of his ape tribe by rescuing the moon from a lion in the sky (say what?).

The Thin Man had a few nice moments but was overall disappointing, especially when compared with Dashiell Hammett’s best known work The Maltese Falcon. Hammett was a good writer, but this seemed bored and perfunctory. I didn’t care about the intricacies of the plot (a noir murder mystery) and I didn’t care what happened to any of the characters (socialites, cops and lowlifes in NYC), even if some of them were a little interesting. The book ends with a four-page dialogue wherein protagonist Nick Charles tells his wife and sorta sidekick Nora, in elaborate detail, whodunit and howdunit. With the last sentence of the book Nora replies, summing up how I felt about the book: “That may be,” Nora said, “but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”

Weirdly it was the last novel Hammett wrote, though he lived another 27 years after its publication.

Capping off Audrey’s three-day birthday weekend, on Monday we drove out to the Columbia Gorge and hiked along Eagle Creek.

We did about 6.5 miles and 600 feet of elevation, and it felt great to give my legs a workout on the uphill sections. The trail is beautiful, following the creek which flows far below you. Roughly two miles up, you come to Punchbowl Falls (pictured), and a nice little clearing suitable for a rest and a snack. A little over a mile after Punchbowl, we reached the High Bridge, where we turned back.

For wildlife we were again stymied, probably because of the amount of human traffic on the trail. For a non-holiday Monday there sure were a lot of people doing a lot of loud stuff. I’m sure trail running is exhilarating and fun, but when you’re on a cliff face with a 20-inch wide trail it’s just annoying. I will neither confirm nor deny that I inwardly wished for the doofus runners to slip on a loose rock and fall into the creek. Also there were tons of big families on the trail, acting big and family-ish.

Good trail, beautiful scenery, too many people. I’m very happy to get back into the Gorge though, and I think we’ll give the Waukeenah Falls-Multnomah Falls loop a go in the near future. We’re also planning a weekend in eastern Oregon, for a desert hike and a couple nights away from the city and people; something in the Steens Mountain area, I think.

I’ve been volunteering at OFB for more than a year now, sorting and repacking donated and salvaged foods to be distributed later at soup kitchens and local hunger relief agencies. I’ve been wanting to do something closer to those distribution points, to help actually get the food into the hands of those who need it, and when I got an email from OFB asking for Harvest Share volunteers, I took the opportunity.

First we set up some distribution tables and laid out all the food — broccoli, peppers, potatoes, cherries, apples, etc. — and prepared food bags, to be given out later to the children at the school (Harvest Share is connected in some way to the free-lunch program at public schools, but I’m not certain of all the details). After a while some families began to arrive, and went down the line for produce. We filled their shopping bags with a good amount of food, based on the size of their families.

Toward the end of the shift, it was time to give the food bags to the kids. We stood by the entrance to the school, and as the kids left to get on their buses, we gave each of them a bag (one of those nylon things with drawstrings that can be worn like a backpack). The kids were thrilled, most of them, to get the food, and I was happy to be able to tell them, “Everybody gets a bag.”

I felt bad for not signing up to work the Blues Fest this year (lazy Lucas!), but working at the Harvest Share program I think makes up for it a little bit. I’ll be doing it every Wednesday for the next month.

(As an aside, a few months ago I started organizing groups of Timbers Army to volunteer at the Food Bank. We’ve got another group going on Saturday August 27 – two groups, actually, one to each location, Portland and Beaverton. If you’re interested in bagging dry goods with local soccer fans, click here for details on how to sign up.)

With no plans for Independence Day, and no desire to waste this brave new summer weather, Audrey and I drove to unincorporated Marion County for a hike among the ghost towns of Champoeg and Butteville.

It was a blazing hot day (well, 80 degrees is hot for western Oregon anyway), all sunshine and blue skies. We got a late start, but arrived at the park at about 11am and commenced to hike.

I was immediately struck by the non-ghost-town appearance of Champoeg: families having barbecues, children playing, people using the river for boating-type activities. (A short-short history of the place: early pioneer settlement; site of formative Oregon government; destroyed by floods and abandoned in the late-19th century.)

When I think “ghost town” I think of the dilapidated settlements we’ve seen along Route 66 in Arizona – Hackberry, Truxton, Oatman – places with rundown saloons and long-unused gas pumps, donkeys walking the streets, etc. Champoeg doesn’t have saloons; hell it doesn’t even have streets, though it does have street signs, in the middle of grassy fields.

So, Champoeg is a state park – and a lovely one – built on the site where a town once stood. Our hike took us along the Willamette River, among tree canopies and a disk-golf course, with the sounds of frolicking boaters never far away. There were a number of vast, treeless meadows, which I guess is the only visible evidence of former settlement, along with the sad little street signs.

The loop we chose took us to the neighboring “Ghost town” of Butteville, and…I hate to harp on semantics, but this isn’t a ghost town either. Whereas Champoeg is just nothing, Butteville feels like an exurb of a small city like Salem, Oregon (which is what it is). There were nice new houses, well-maintained roads, and plenty of signs of vital human habitation.

Our turnaround point was the Butteville Historic Store, which seemed a lot like a normal store with the word “historic” in the name. I kid, it was nice, we bought some orange soda pop and drank it on the patio.

As for wildlife: plenty of birds, including a hawk of undetermined nature, screaming far up in a tree; one rabbit; some weird mottled squirrels that rolled around in the dirt like chinchillas; and dozens of bicyclists (the route to Butteville is a bike path).

We did about eight miles on the day, with effectively zero elevation gain. I’m looking forward to when we’re doing double-digits on every hike, and getting some good gluteal-strengthening uphill hikes. Now that the weather is officially Summery, I suspect we’ll get into the Gorge soon. For the record, my boots are performing spectacularly.