reviews Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha, who made the ultimate sacrifice while investigating a wave of bomb threats and explosions. Their lives are prime examples of underpaid, exhausted and overworked civil servants determined to discover the truth, even as others, including their superiors, are more interested in personal profit and status. Twilight at the World of Tomorrow smartly mixes political, cultural, historical and mystery elements, giving readers a thorough, gripping account of a key period that changed the nation and the world forever. —RON WYNN
Nine Lives By William Dalrymple Knopf $26.95, 304 pages ISBN 9780307272829
RELIGION
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Since at least the 1960s—when millions of college students carried a copy of Hermann Hesse’s classic tale of Buddhist spirituality, Siddhartha, in their back pockets— Western society has often turned to the East in search of ancient wisdom associated with Indian religious traditions and religious practices as diverse as yoga, tantric sex and meditation. Although attention to these Indian religions suddenly flourished, very few of their admirers thought of them as dynamic, evolving spiritual traditions, capable of adapting to the changing needs of a rapidly developing society. Now, in Nine Lives—a kind of follow-up to his stunning From the Holy Mountain—William Dalrymple brilliantly narrates the lives of nine people, from a prison warden to a Jain nun to a prostitute, to offer us a portrait of the ways in which India’s religious identity—far from being a deep well of unchanging wisdom—is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing rapidly as Indian society transforms itself at lightning speed. In Kannur, for example, Dalrymple meets Hari Das, a prison
NONFICTION warden and well-digger. For nine months of the year, Das—whose job places him among the dalits, or “untouchables”—polices inmates; but for three months, between December and March, during the theyyam dancing season, the caste system is turned upside down as an untouchable turns into a Brahmin, or priest. Das transforms into the god Vishnu (the role he plays in these annual religious rituals), and everything in his life changes as he brings blessings to the villagers and exorcises evil spirits. In a number of other compelling stories, Dalrymple’s first-rate book pulls back the curtain on modern Indian society and reveals how deeply the spiritual is etched in people’s lives and the creative ways in which these people are adapting their religious practices to momentous and rapid social changes. — H e nry L . C a rr i g a n J r .
Long for This World By Jonathan Weiner Ecco $27.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780060765361
SCIENCE
Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch. Weiner teaches science writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and he brings that same direct style to his books. In Long for This World, Weiner explains mankind’s long fascination with immortality. He draws on the works of Dante, Shakespeare and Darwin, among others, to establish a historical foundation for the subject. He also interviews some of the top scientists in the field, most notably Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, a British author and researcher who thinks of aging as a disease and is seeking a cure to stop the aging process. Even apart from his intriguing area of study, de Grey is a particularly colorful character: “When he stands up, his beard reaches a surprising distance toward his waist. . . . He looks like Methuselah before the Flood. Father Time before his hair turned gray. Timothy Leary Unbound.” It’s that kind of colorful, descriptive writing that makes Long for This World so readable—just as it should be for a book that celebrates mankind’s imagination, inventiveness and inspiration. — J ohn T . S l a n i a
Four Fish
When we consider the concept of immortality, we often think of famous people like Ponce de Leon searching for the Fountain of Youth, or the late baseball legend Ted Williams, who asked that his body be cryogenically frozen in the hope that science would someday find a “cure” for death. Yes, immortality is a strange and mysterious subject. And in the hands of a gifted writer like Jonathan Weiner, man’s quest for immortality becomes illuminating and inspiring. Weiner’s Long for This World poses the questions: Could we live forever? And if we could, would we want to? Long for This World explores these questions from both a historical context and a contemporary point of view. It is a science book, but one written with verve and vitality. It examines complicated concepts, but it does so with clear and creative writing. We’ve come to expect this from Weiner, the author of numerous books on science, including the
By Paul Greenberg Penguin Press $25.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781594202568 Also available on audio
FOOD
What appears on our national and global dinner plates has come under intense scrutiny in the last decade, as many of the world’s food production practices are devastating the natural abundance and health of planet Earth. In the wake of such eye-opening books as Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and, more recently, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals comes journalist Paul Greenberg’s excellent investigation into global fisheries and fishing practices, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Admittedly, Greenberg is a fish guy. As a youngster he avidly fished for bass, first in a pristine pond near his Connecticut home; then,
as a teenager, he took to the sea in a beat-up aluminum boat. “I thought of the sea,” he writes, “as a vessel of desires and mystery, a place of abundance I did not need to question.” But boys grow up, and other interests crowd out childhood passions. The allure of fishing faded until Greenberg decided to revive the habit in the early 2000s. Returning to his former fishing grounds, he found that the flounder, blackfish and mackerel that he used to catch in abundance had moved on, dwindled or disappeared. He traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard and down into Florida, “fishing all the way” and meeting many fisherman, all of whom had the same complaint: “Smaller fish, fewer of them, shorter fishing windows . . . fewer species to catch.” Visiting fish markets (another childhood habit), Greenberg noted that “four varieties of fish consistently appeared that had little to do with the waters adjacent to the fish market in question: salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna.” Over the next decade, he determined to find out why “this peculiarly consistent flow of four fish from the different waters of the globe” was ending up on our dinner plate. What follows is an extraordinarily attentive, witty, sensitive and commonsense narrative about salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna that covers their origination, life cycles and the ever-evolving saga of their exploitation by humans. Backed by rigorous research and enlivened by Greenberg’s man-on-the-spot reportage, the book charts the history and rise of the world’s appetite for these four fish, the industrial fishing practices and the “epochal shifts” in these fish populations—from habitat damage and overfishing of the last wild stocks to the often dubious farming and aquaculture enterprises that now dominate the fish production marketplace. While Greenberg believes that we need the oceans’ harvest to feed an ever-increasing human population, he acknowledges that a “primitive” human greed has helped land us in an ecological tangle. But this inspiring book doesn’t just diagnose the problem; Greenberg puts forth an ameliorating set of principles that can help us to live in better balance with the “wild oceans” that sustain us. — Al i son H oo d