the occurrences on the massive oil rig to explore what North Sea drilling did to life in Scotland, with the heaviest impact on the coastal city of Aberdeen. After chronicling the horrific multistage explosions that consumed so many lives, the author on those manning nearby seaworthy vessels who tried to rescue the Piper Alpha crew. The aftermath of the disaster, including capping the drilling apparatus and extinguishing the fires, receives minute attention as well. The investigation by UK authorities did little to satisfy public outcry, and certainly did little to enhance oil-rig safety around the globe. There are plenty of villains in the narrative, though Matsen concentrates on Armand Hammer, who came to the oil industry during advanced middle age, aggressively built Occidental Petroleum from a tiny California-based company to a worldwide behemoth during the 1960s and ’70s and staked so much capital on the North Sea drilling that safety concerns did not receive adequate attention. A searing indictment of human greed mixed with memorable sagas of death and survival. (8 pages of black-and-white illustrations. Agent: Richard Abate)
JOHN HUSTON Courage and Art
Meyers, Jeffrey Crown Archetype (496 pp.) $30.00 | September 27, 2011 978-0-307-59067-1 A richly flavorful biography of John Huston, great director and bona fide man’s man. Highly prolific biography Meyers (Orwell: Life and Art, 2010, etc.) presents a comprehensive life of Huston, a filmmaker of unusual range and power and a protean figure in real life, a renaissance man whose passions ran toward beautiful women, hunting, art and literature, gambling and general derring-do. The son of celebrated actor Walter Huston, John pursued painting and writing in his youth, accumulating a Hemingway-esque aura living rough in Mexico and London before embarking on his wildly successful Hollywood career. Huston was in fact a close friend of Hemingway’s, and Meyers goes to some length explicating the similarities of the men; both were passionate individualists, obsessed with macho notions of masculinity. The author is at least as interested in Huston’s persona—grandiloquent, casually cruel or generous, prone to boredom and constitutionally unable to practice monogamy—as he is in the man’s work. This pays dividends in descriptions of his friendly, competitive relationships with tough guys like Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, and in Meyer’s accounts of the appalling bullying suffered by meeker collaborators such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Ray Bradbury. However, the copious cataloging of his many complicated love affairs and marriages becomes tediously repetitive and ultimately depressing. Meyers is informative and insightful about Huston’s film triumphs (including The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen) and flops (Annie), providing fresh anecdotes about their production and 1328
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astute analysis of Huston’s laissez-faire directorial style (he believed in honoring the text and leaving the actors alone), making a strong case for Huston as one of cinema’s most accomplished and significant creators. The author is perhaps a bit overly enamored with his magnificent monster of a subject (and indulges a weakness for strained puns and clumsy humor), but this biography is a serious, intelligent, highly readable reckoning with Huston’s outsize legacy. (8-page insert. Agent: Ellen Levine)
BELIEVING IS SEEING Observations on the Mysteries of Photography
Morris, Errol Penguin Press (320 pp.) $40.00 | September 5, 2011 978-1-59420-301-5
Master documentarian Morris serves up an erudite, sometimes recondite examination of the power of photographs to conceal as much as they reveal. The author, known for films such as The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, is a truth-teller, skilled at using filmic and photographic evidence to reveal truth and innocence. Here he interrogates the truth—or not—of images iconic and scarcely known, beginning with a long and sometimes dauntingly technical disquisition on a brace of photographs taken in the Crimean War following the vaunted Charge of the Light Brigade. In one image, cannonballs lie neatly arranged along the side of the road along which the attack occurred; in another, the cannonballs are strewn about as if they had fallen there. Did the British photographer move the cannonballs to heighten the drama of the image, or did British engineers clean up the road so that equipment could pass? In other words, which image came first? Doggedly, Morris traveled to Crimea to find the site and puzzle over the position of the sun to answer those questions. The crossexamination is leisurely, methodical, sometimes even plodding, but there’s a purpose to the slow establishment of forensic fact, since Morris then moves on to more recent—and certainly controversial—photographs taken at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Readers will remember the smiling thumbs-up over corpses, the damaged fellow standing wired as if ready to be crucified. So does Morris, who insists, “The photographs are the start of a trail of evidence, but not the end…We shouldn’t allow what happened at Abu Ghraib to disappear except for a smile.” Along the way, the author gets in a few digs at theoreticians of photography, taking genteel issue with the arid Susan Sontag/Roland Barthes school of interpretation. But mostly he sticks to what he sees before him, and not on what others have seen and said. Students of photography—and fans of CSI—will find this a provocative, memorable book.
kirkusreviews.com
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THE SECRET LIFE OF PRONOUNS What Our Words Say About Us
LIFEBLOOD How to Change the World One Mosquito at a Time
Perry, Alex PublicAffairs (256 pp.) $25.99 | September 6, 2011 978-1-61039-086-6
Pennebaker, James W. Bloomsbury (368 pp.) $28.00 | August 16, 2011 978-1-60819-480-3 A comprehensive investigation of how our words—what we say and how we say it—reveal important insights about our behavior, emotions and personalities. Pennebaker (Psychology/Univ. of Texas; Writing to Heal, 2004, etc.) is well-known in psychotherapy circles for his work in the way language and mental health correspond. Here, the author continues exploring this connection between emotion, behavior, perception, cognition and language with a specific focus on what he calls “stealth words,” or the small function words in our lexicon, like prepositions and pronouns, that are seemingly invisible in day-to-day speech. Pennebaker’s own research and analysis of other linguistic and psychological studies is exhaustive and includes an immense amount of computational data via analytical programs like Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (or LIWC) and methods like LSM or language style matching detection. However, the author balances his data analysis with interesting and entertaining anecdotes, examples, narratives and dialogue, and his research sampling is vast: tweets by Paris Hilton and Oprah Winfrey, online dating profiles, King Lear, love letters between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning vs. the language of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, samples of instant messaging, scenes from The Godfather, presidential press conferences and more. The author successfully demonstrates that seemingly innocuous function words—I, me, you, he, can, for, it, of, this—play a crucial role in understanding identity, detecting emotions and realizing intention; they also provide important clues about social and cultural cohesion. In addition to these varied language samples, Pennebaker investigates a wide range of situations and topics including trauma from war or abuse, social and gender inequity and relationships of power, as well as daily self-perception or self-deception. Some assertions that seem like hasty generalizations—i.e., that couples who use parallel function words are more likely to have a happy marriage—are supported with such a preponderance of evidence that they become convincing and compelling. Essential reading for psychotherapists and readers interested in the connection between language and human behavior, emotion and perception.
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The near-success story of one man’s fight to control malaria in Africa, related by Time Africa bureau chief Perry (Falling Off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization, 2008). That man is Ray Chambers, a self-made millionaire for whom money was distinctly not everything, but who discovered that helping the poor, especially children dying of malaria in Africa, would be the most satisfying thing he could do. Thus was born the idea of distributing insecticide-treated bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa. Though it wasn’t a new idea, Chambers adopted the business model that had worked for him on Wall Street, leveraging funding from multiple sources and specifying targets and timelines. A major key was Chambers’ ability to sweet-talk transnational corporations into becoming funders, noting that it was in their own self-interest to support bed nets, thus reducing absenteeism and improving workers’ health and morale. Starting in 2009, Chambers’ target was 300 million nets, reaching 600 million people by the end of 2010. He came close, but the target grew; however, he succeeded in getting the goods, just not in time. The Chambers story must be told, Perry writes, especially in light of the gloom-and-doom saying of so many NGOs and government agencies who were often critical—and whom the author takes to task for inertia, if not downright lying in their fundraising efforts). Perry bookends the text with before and after visits to Apac, Uganda, a hopeless malarial hell before the Chambers campaign. The author cites impressive data on disease reduction, clinic-building, etc., but there are still questions: How do you sustain disease control, teach proper net use and replace nets when they wear out. What happens when insecticide resistance develops? How do you coordinate control programs with vaccine and drug development in a continent beset by corruption, scandal, poverty, tribal war and massive refugee movements? In that light, Chambers’ story is the most upbeat to date—almost emblematic of the old adage, “where there’s a will there’s a way.”
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