book capsule reviews

“The Future History of the Arctic”

By Charles Emmerson

PublicAffairs (392 pp., $28.95)

“In the mind of a ten-year-old almost any line on a map is worth crossing for the sake of it.” Charles Emmerson turned his childhood fascination with “our half-imagined Arctic” into a life’s work. In “The Future History of the Arctic,” Emmerson explains the forces that have shaped the history of the Arctic and will shape its future. He never loses his childhood sense of wonder at the land above 66 degrees 33’ 39” north; the Arctic remains for him an idea that cannot be mapped. As a child, however, he believed in its resilience; as an adult, he understands its vulnerability. The book comes full of characters — explorers, politicians, shipping magnates, artists, scientists — as well as with a rich vein of marginalia. Their dreams of the Arctic give the book an archival feel.

Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“Ghosts of Wyoming: Stories”

By Alyson Hagy (Graywolf

172 pp., $15 paperback)

These eight burnished stories confirm Alison Hagy’s importance in American literature; her seamless blending of landscape and lives, her very modern understanding of the vulnerability of kindness. It is of course terrifying to think that a life can be reduced to metaphor, as in her story “Brief Lives of the Trainmen”: “He tucks his belongings under one arm and shimmies open the boxcar door. The morning smells of mule and tar. The surveyors’ tents, set like a widow woman’s teacups on the flat plain to the south, are barely visible against the chalky soil he can taste when the wind blows his way.” But Hagy doesn’t so much reduce as pare away the back story, the ancestry, the potential to reveal a moment to which a character brings everything. In “The Border,” for example, the boy who steals a dog is so much more: a human running from cruelty, whose life is continually “sent backward.” Metaphor works so well in the western landscape — all that space where it can run itself out. In the East, it can seem jarring as metaphors ricochet off a more cluttered, suburban stage set. Hagy’s writing is stylized but still rings true. Echoes, in fact.

Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World”

By Eve Ensler (Villard, 150 pp., $20)

In this series of monologues, Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” imagines the voices of teenage girls from around the world. “As a woman,” Carol Gilligan writes of Ensler in her foreword, “she knows the pressures on girls to silence themselves, to act as if they have no feelings or their feelings do not matter. ... A girl claiming her emotions breaks a silence and unleashes a vast resource of clean energy.” And energy is released: The girl growing up in the suburbs faces pressure from her friends to buy clothing that her mother, a temp secretary, can’t afford. The girl in Iran whose parents insisted on buying her a nose job misses her old nose. Chang Ying, growing up in China, works 12 hours a day in a factory that makes Barbie doll heads. “Because I make Barbie’s head,” she writes, “I send my thoughts into each one of her brains.” The girl in the Congo who survived sexual slavery writes: “When it happens ... you will think, ’These are just crazy soldiers fooling around. ... They are old enough to be my father. They know better than this.’ This will be confusing. It will make you feel stupid. It will make you feel like what is happening is not really happening. It will make you feel like you did something wrong.” These are sorrowful voices, and the waste is everywhere: waste of beauty, talent, grace. Sometimes their powerful exuberance rises up and you believe they have a shot at happiness.

Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth: A Memoir”

By Brenda Peterson (DaCapo Press, 288 pp., $25)

Like immigrants from other cultures, successive generations in America grow further from the once-powerful religious beliefs of their forebears. Environmental stewardship, the tenets and rituals of sustainability provide a new meeting ground for lost and wayward religions. In the house that Brenda Peterson grew up in, Southern Baptist relatives with their prophesies of doom lay down, lion-and-lamb-style, side by side with the beliefs (political and moral) of her father, a forest ranger in the High Sierra. Peterson goes forth to live in New York City and works at the New Yorker. Then, she designs her own brand of activism: moving to Seattle and watching over a local seal population, being part of a community that includes flora and fauna. It is a rich and often lovely life — full of humor and Peterson’s own unique brand of faith. “You know, George,” she tells her neighbor, who’s a Pentecostal and speaks to her of tribulation, rapture and leaving the Earth for the kingdom of Christ, “I really want to be left behind.”

Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times