If You've Become Uncomfortable In Your Comfort Zone...

Andy Molinsky, Ph.D., Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge, and Build Confidence

Back in the Paleolithic Era, having a fairly small comfort zone probably made good sense. Fearless people likely got eaten by lions. But today's relatively lion-free environment makes hugging our comfort zones perilous and constricting. Our reasons for avoiding uncomfortable situations are as numerous as our tactics. But the short-term stress relief robs us of long-term opportunities. Sadly, just telling ourselves to get out of our comfort zones doesn't work.

Brandeis organizational psych professor Andy Molinsky has dedicated years to studying this conundrum, and published dense research project on the topic. Thankfully, this book avoids the scholarly jargon of such papers. Writing with business professionals, job interviewees, and students in mind, Molinsky crafts a nuts-and-bolts explanation of why we have comfort zones, why we should step outside them, and how to achieve that seemingly impossible goal.

Permit me to paraphrase Molinsky, without giving anything away, since he says everything better, and in more detail than I could. We have five basic mental justifications for our comfort zones: because whatever makes us uncomfortable feels inauthentic or immoral, may make others perceive us as incompetent or unlikeable, or it really shouldn’t be our responsibility anyway. Molinsky identifies these five causes from both academic research, and in-person interviews.

Once we recognize which principle, or combination of principles, hold us back, we have three tools available to re-stack the deck in our favor. Molinsky calls these tools Conviction, Customization, and Clarity. This means we believe whatever makes us uncomfortable still really needs doing; we can organize how we handle our circumstances to minimize discomfort; and we have enough self-awareness to face our challenges without them breaking us.

It really is that simple, though like most simple explanations, it’s really not that simple. Molinsky wouldn’t have written a 250-page book if he could’ve written a fortune cookie. His book combines psychological research with field interviews, demonstrating ways people have allowed their comfort zones to constrain them, and how applying these simple principles has transformed their lives. If Molinsky’s interview transcripts are credible, “transformed” isn’t an exaggeration.

Andy Molinsky, Ph.D.

Molinsky puts his most important points in this book’s first half. Though he’s guilty of a little throat-clearing in the earliest pages, he mostly gets down to brass tacks, combining his measured principles with stories that serve as object lessons. His stories are often very personal, yet concise in structure, without excessive rumination. They demonstrate how people got out of their own paths and stopped being their own worst obstruction.

This isn’t a book of straightforward exercises. I admit being disappointed by that, as I’d expected something like Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct, which combines high-minded theories with road-tested exercises for beginners. Molinsky compares this book to a free-form recipe, where rather than fixed measurements, we have a broad outline of what the finished product could look like. We simply have to interpret freely, putting our stamp on the recipe.

Not that Molinsky prescribes no concrete actions. As a sometime writing teacher, my favorite involves describing your own situation, in writing, in third person. Crystallizing ideas into words, Molinsky demonstrates, frees people to act, besides having quantifiable physical health benefits, according to one of his sources. So we have concrete actions, just no step-by-step journaling procedures. That probably works better overall, but requires your effort to get started.

Reading this book, I see myself, and other loved ones besides. As we get older, as we own more stuff and have more responsibilities to family and community, our comfort zones contract. Mine has become strangling. But Molinsky demonstrates we needn’t risk everything we treasure, to venture outside ourselves. By understanding why we’ve become so risk-averse, and applying Molinsky’s Triple-C approach, we’ll find doors opening immediately.

This book probably belongs on the same nonfiction-as-self-help shelf as Malcolm Gladwell and James Duhigg. It has the same purpose of taking known, well-studied science, and turning it into actionable advice. But unlike those other writers, who attempt to disguise their self-help as journalism, Molinsky, a working research scientist, doesn’t pretend his advice is anything but advice. Like Daniel Kahneman, he comes right out and says: Do This.

I’m still working to incorporate this book’s advice into my thought processes. Because this book really is about me, and people like me, it presents an opportunity to stop my decline into stultifying comfort. If you’re like me, and you probably are, this book is for and about you. Please grab this opportunity to turn your life into something greater. I already feel energized, knowing this exists.

Goodman's Digital Dystopia

Marc Goodman, Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

It always bothers me when I concur with a book’s core assertions, and must recommend audiences not read it anyway. With nonfiction, this usually happens when an author draws our attention to neglected topics, especially those which have often unexamined implications, but the author doesn’t stage the argument well. Maybe it reflects my background in teaching composition, but nothing sours my appreciation like an undifferentiated firehose of information. Such is the case with Marc Goodman.

Ex-LAPD turned global digital security consultant, Marc Goodman has participated in increasing corporate and private security measures. This gives him boots-on-the-ground familiarity with how organized crime, espionage specialists, and crafty teenagers abuse today’s networked world. When ordinary citizens send credit card information across WiFi or smartphones, when social networks market access to private eyeballs, and when market trackers create massive profiles of everybody online, we’re unprecedentedly vulnerable. As Goodman puts it, “Mo’ Screens, Mo’ Problems.”

My problem isn’t anything Goodman says. Informed audiences should already understand his broad outline, though he helpfully provides clarifying details. Those Terms of Service agreements you accept without reading? The average American would need 76 eight-hour workdays annually to read them all. PayPal’s Terms of Service runs nearly 40,000 words—longer than Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, without characters or motivations. Even if you read them, most include stipulations that “they” can change terms without notice.

Meanwhile, criminals have developed elaborate processes to circumvent security. Goodman notes, security specialists must anticipate every possible attack; lawbreakers need only find one liability. Meanwhile, thought leaders like Ben Horowitz recommend deliberately selling bug-ridden early drafts of software, using paying customers as uncompensated beta testers. This leaves consumers vulnerable to spiteful pranksters, the Mafia, and even China’s People’s Liberation Army, known to have deliberately hacked corporations and citizens to expropriate American and international trade secrets.

No, my problem isn’t what Goodman says, it’s how he says it. Goodman divides his text into three parts, and Part One, which consumes nearly half the book’s mass, unrelentingly dumps chilling crime data in readers’ laps. Between tales of deliberate crime, squicky corporate data hoarding, and actual malicious destruction, it mounts up. Goodman doesn’t break this litany of misery, except for the occasional half-page snippet of exposition, for over 150 pages, leaving readers tired.

Marc Goodman

This results in a phenomenon familiar to many professions, from government reformers to Christian missionaries: compassion fatigue. People reading narratives of poverty, oppression, or in this case crime, quickly become discouraged when statistics accumulate. With individual narratives, people feel moved to act; when patterns develop, people become discouraged and fatalistic. According to philanthropist Richard Stearns, that happens appallingly early: when naming actual victims of inequality or crime, people become discouraged when the pattern hits… two.

Thus Goodman says many right things in exactly the wrong way. I’d use exactly this strategy to discourage audiences about their ability to address current problems. Rather than keeping focus on one problem, or one constellation of problems, and appropriate correlating solutions, he completely segregates crisis from resolution. We get crushed by the weight of problems long before reaching the solutions, assuming we do reach the solutions: I frankly got tired and made tortoise-like progress.

Certainly, Goodman also discusses redresses to these problems. But he does this only so late that many readers have already either given into nihilism, or joins the Luddites. Perhaps Goodman thought the story arc from Hollywood dramas, where everything generally gets worse and worse until our white-hatted hero reverses things, would convey his message emotionally. But this isn’t some scripted drama. The answer isn’t Liam Neeson kicking everybody’s ass. This really happens to real people.

Goodman doesn’t trade in hypotheticals. He doesn’t invent threats that need addressed in the airy-fairy future, because he doesn’t need to (though he does sometimes extrapolate). Horror stories abound in nonfiction, from joshing teenagers hijacking municipal rail control networks, to massive data leaks at Symantec. Yes, that Symantec, which manufactures Norton security. Despite the “Future Crimes” title, Goodman details threats that exist right now, and risk becoming even more perilous as our networked technology increases.

I struggled to retain Goodman’s thread beneath the mass of techno-legal horror tales. I should be Goodman’s target audience, since I support his fundamental thesis about digital vulnerabilities. Just as most citizens cannot comprehend their investment portfolios, we also cannot manage our digital privacy individually. Goodman raises important questions for both private and regulatory consideration. These issues will increasingly color life in coming years. Goodman just stages his claims in ways that leave me despondent.

Every Mother's Nightmare

Steve Jackson, Bogeyman

In the middle 1980s, four little girls in two states vanished. Ranging from three to ten years old, they disappeared utterly, leaving behind scanty clues—one dropped lunchbox, a sweatshirt. Only one girl narrowly escaped, witnessing her attacker’s face, but lost her friend to the anonymous monster. Bodies appeared months or even years later, across jurisdictional lines. Before networked investigation databases, police never noticed the connection between various crimes. Without evidence, cases languished for decades.

Veteran true crime author Steve Jackson channels the well-established In Cold Blood tradition of absenting himself from the plot, like a journalist, while constructing a narrative, driven by action and dialog, influenced by novel-writing technique. Jackson’s gradually unfolding story feels familiar to anybody accustomed to reading police procedurals and crime thrillers. The horrifying aspects of Jackson’s narrative, of the very killer every parent dreads their children encountering, become only more eerie because they really happened.

Garland, Texas, police detective Gary Sweet became interested in the unsolved murders one decade later, shortly after earning his detective’s badge, when he discovered the case documents buried inside the building. One decade already cold, the Roxanne Reyes murder had gone cold, lacking evidence. Sweet, a seasoned lawman and Christian convert who considered police work a religious calling, adopted the Reyes murder as personal campaign. But he had no clue how connected this case was.

The killer who murdered Roxanne Reyes proved crafty. He stalked victims assiduously, abducting only those whose absence wouldn’t be missed during those critical hours. He deposited bodies in secluded places, inside somebody else’s jurisdiction, ensuring they wouldn’t be discovered until critical evidence decayed. Everybody assumed his victims, all girls, were sexually assaulted, but evidence rotted away. Some bodies were so deteriorated, families could only identify their daughters by their clothing. No adult ever saw him.

Jackson describes Detective Sweet’s apprenticeship in crime’s most repellent side. Though outsiders often consider Garland just another Dallas suburb, it’s actually a fairly large, self-contained city, with big city crime problems. Sweet, with the dedication common to people who consider themselves on a mission, learned to befriend the most reprehensible criminals, unlock their secrets, and coax confessions from people who have committed acts so heinous, even dedicated crime fans couldn’t tolerate ten minutes beside them.

David Penton: literally the man
your mother warned you about

TV police make crime-solving look like lots of fieldwork, high-tech databases, and combing evidence to build incontrovertible cases. In Jackson’s telling, Detective Sweet actually spends hours, even days, running paperwork, engaging in jurisdictional politics, and finagling advantage wherever he can. Sweet needed to unpack this case gradually, working part-time over a decade while carrying a full load of active cases. Neither glamorous nor exciting, Jackson makes Sweet’s dedicated investigation look remarkably like hard, thankless work.

But humans’ natural tendency to talk proved Robert Penton’s undoing. Imprisoned elsewhere for a murder uncomfortably similar to Roxanne Reyes, Penton began building jailhouse credentials by boasting to fellow inmates of various crimes he purportedly committed, outwitting police and skating scot-free. He managed to offend and disgust even hardened sex offenders, until one finally turned informant. If even a fraction of Penton’s boasts proved true, he surely counts among America’s most prolific child killers ever.

Prodigiously smart but violently damaged, Penton represents every parent’s nightmare, the sexual predator smart enough to outwit police, game the system, and remain perennially undetected. Personally unassuming, Penton travelled widely, following work beneath his intellect. Bosses remember him as an industrious but undistinguished employee. But jobs, for Penton, mattered little. The travelling offered him opportunity to stalk new victims, prolong their torture, and amble away with absolute impunity. Life-altering trauma lingered everywhere in his wake.

Just because he had Penton’s jailhouse braggadocio, however, didn’t mean Sweet had his killer. Lacking physical evidence, and building only from the hearsay testimony of another convicted sex offender, Sweet had an unusually difficult case to construct, connecting Penton to not just Reyes, but four other cases Sweet could identify (others certainly went unidentified). The sketchy evidence, two-decade time lag between crime and conviction, and Penton’s tendency to fabricate, made this Sweet’s hardest case ever.

As police procedurals often do, Jackson starts with an acknowledgement of who committed the real crime, an acknowledgement shocking in both its nature and its specific detail. The only question remains: will Sweet get his man? We know, because we’re reading, that he already did, but Jackson’s telling emphasizes just how tenuous, just how contingent, any criminal case actually is. Even knowing the outcome, the tension leaves us sweating, because Sweet could be us, too.

The Best American 2013

Elizabeth Gilbert (editor), The Best American Travel Writing 2013 and
Siddhartha Mukherjee (editor), The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

The most interesting essays in each year’s Best American Travel Writing usually address some place no sane person would go. This year includes visiting a faith healer in Tanzania’s deep interior; sharing tea with Bedouins known to kidnap Western tourists; meeting an aspiring teenage poet in an illegal wildcat gold mine high in the Peruvian Andes. The authors make their settings, distant as another planet, seem humane and nearby.

Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat Pray Love fame, in her introduction says: “I read great travel writing to feel, at the conclusion, I have now been there.” But she doesn’t hold herself or her authors legalistically to this standard. Daniel Tyx and Ian Frazier, for instance, don’t travel anywhere during their essays. Tyx discusses the momentous decision to stay put, while Frazier reminisces how travel psychology has changed in his lifetime.

Most essays, though, consider some place, particularly the people who make this place so fascinating. David Farley, in “Vietnam’s Bowl of Secrets,” describes the family who makes a unique rice noodle considered a delicacy, but so rare that you can only purchase it in one Vietnamese village. Christopher de Ballaigue’s “Caliph of the Tricksters” describes Kabul plutocrats who endure Afghanistan’s generational violence by betting on gory, interminable cockfights.

This year’s selections run short and concise. Many essays run under four pages; only two exceed twenty pages. Yet these authors pack their narratives with such incisive, engaging detail that one feels refreshed after reading, like returning from a much-needed vacation. Celebrity authors like Frazier or David Sedaris rub shoulders with wise but unfamous professionals who tell tales well. These compact, elegant essays transport eager readers outside their humdrum existence.

Gilbert succeeds in her stated mission. I really feel I’ve visited Sinai, or coastal Maine, or Britain’s ill-starred Dickens World park. Having never seen these places myself, I feel I could knowledgeably discuss them with natives, or anyway ask smart questions of seasoned travelers. These essays make engaging, uplifting lunchtime holidays, restful breaks from the non-literary world. I feel rested, restored, and more cosmopolitan for having read this collection.

Elsewhere, oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee aggregates twenty-seven essays from across scientific and naturalistic disciplines. Some are written by scientists and researchers, including one Nobel laureate. Others come from journalists, novelists, and other writers with strong interest in developing science. Some discuss single, specific discoveries; others have more eclectic scope, describing entire ranges of new thought or developing disciplines of science.

A rare Mediterranean jellyfish doesn’t die of old age; it just reverts to childhood and relives its life. I learned that in one essay. But in another essay, at almost the far end of this collection, an oceanic researcher, one of the first women in a formerly all-male field, laments that the beautiful ecosystems that first made her love the ocean sixty years ago, are now severely depleted, in danger of imminent extinction.

Our real joy comes in the unspoken relationships between essays. David Deutsch and Arthur Eckert, for instance, describe implications of quantum physics for molecular-level computers, potentially defining processing capabilities grander than anything we’ve previously considered. But Michael Moyer describes how, approaching the Planck Length, the smallest possible length in existence, reality itself appears granular, binary, almost computerized. The potential interplay between these two realizations is chillingly beautiful.

Likewise, both Jerome Groopman and Katherine Harmon describe how recent developments in immunology offer new hope in fighting invasive cancers. But while Groopman examines the science, hopscotching among personalities, Harmon intensively focuses on one man whose discoveries let him treat his own cancer, with remarkable consequences. The shifting focus between ideas and personalities reveals unspoken truths about how science makes its advances.

Unlike other Best American selections, this one resists celebrity authors. Sure, Oliver Sacks and Kevin Dutton include excerpts from their latest books, and authors famous from other fields, like Mark Bowden, contribute to the collection’s overarching movement. But this specific collection rewards profound ideas, explained well, rather than authorial virtuosity. I contend this makes it easier reading, since the product, not the personality, defines quality.

I abandoned my childhood ambition to become a scientist when I discovered it’s hard to make test tubes explode. But I never quit my love of science and discovery, and continue enjoying new insights into how our universe works. This collection, laced with eye-opening expositions in the latest science, reminds me why I love science, and why our society, plagued by anti-intellectual thinking, needs science so badly. Read this book, and relearn the joy of discovery.



For reviews of other collections in this series, see:
The Year's Best Alice Munro and
Proving Personal Writing Still Matters

Proving Personal Writing Still Matters

Cheryl Strayed, editor, The Best American Essays 2013

In reading this year’s edition of the Best American Essays, the format struck me before the content. Most years’ editions sequence the essays alphabetically by authors’ last names. Not so this year, where editor Cheryl Strayed organizes twenty-six essays in a manner somehow differently. The thematic structure doesn’t present itself obviously until readers penetrate well into her sequence. Even afterward, her subtleties aren’t necessarily obvious.

The word “essay” has been cheapened by generations of schoolteachers who, lacking any other term for the five-paragraph monotonies students write to prove they’ve done the reading, yclept them “essays.” But this does the idea no justice. This series returns essays to the meaning they had when Montaigne pioneered the form, calling them the French for “attempts.” As in, let’s try this shit and see what happens.

And boy, oh boy, does something happen. Strayed compiles some well-known authors, including Charles Baxter, Zadie Smith, and Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro, but she mostly shares less famous writers who, by turning hard, unblinking eyes on their own lives, manage to recount stories that exceed their authors. These writers prove George Bernard Shaw’s adage that only the intimately personal ever becomes truly universal.

Some essays address larger topics. Walter Kirn’s “Confessions of an Ex-Mormon” answers media stereotypes about Mitt Romney’s religion by recounting Kirn’s brief flirtation with Mormonism, and how it continues to save his life. Angela Morales’ “The Girls in My Town” gently laments how economic realities create two classes in America’s wealthiest state. Jon Kerstetter’s “Triage” reveals what happens in the moment combat surgeons choose to let a GI die.

Others remain more insular, unpacking something specific to the author. Tod Goldberg’s “When They Let Them Bleed” correlates “Boom Boom” Mancini’s most famous fight with his own obese, self-mortifying youth. Richard Schmitt’s “Sometimes a Romantic Notion” debunks the melodrama behind joining the circus. Steven Harvey’s “The Book of Knowledge” reveals what he discovered when he reread his late mother’s letters, discovering a disquieting stranger in his house.

Cheryl Strayed

Strayed also includes the most chilling essays I’ve ever seen in this series, Vanessa Veselka’s “Highway of Lost Girls” and Matthew Vollmer’s “Keeper of the Flame.” These two invade readers’ consciousness with such incisive power that I dare say nothing more about them. However, Strayed places them very early in the collection, leaving readers’ nerves frayed and jangling, prepared for the profound nuances of everything that comes after.

Early essays start big, addressing the authors’ personal weight in major issues. There’s a great deal of objective fact: the 1987 Black Monday stock collapse, Mitt Romney, a schoolboy’s death in a Dallas trash dumpster. These stories have a place not only in the authors’ worlds, but in ours, and their stories impinge upon us readers as concretely as the nightly news. We respond because we recognize ourselves.

As the collection progresses, however, essays become increasingly personal. Authors start omitting details like dates, geographical addresses, and sometimes even names. The language becomes transient, narratives grow non-linear, and the essays come to resemble poetry for our aggressively non-poetic age. By inviting us into their lives, rather than visiting ours, the authors make themselves vulnerable, and we find ourselves wanting to trust them.

I’ve used prior editions of this series as Freshman Comp texts, and would cheerfully use this edition too. Strayed’s selections don’t merely showcase diverse, challenging topics—from cancer and postpartum depression and grief, to love and family and music. She also chooses authors who convey their topics well, with professional attention to well-chosen words and phrases that convey beyond their literal meaning. I can pay no higher compliment than to say this collection makes me want to try something new as a writer.

Unfortunately, as more states move to adopt Common Core educational standards, many parents don’t realize the standards explicitly discourage personal writing. Though Common Core explicitly encourages nonfiction reading, that doesn’t include essays like those in this collection. David Coleman, who co-wrote Common Core, has said: “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Yet this series’ continued success, and the caliber of writing in this collection, prove the lie in that statement. Personal writing matters because humans are empathetic beings; by sharing others’ thoughts and feelings, we think and feel more deeply ourselves. As the dwindling magazine industry dries up venues for innovative, risk-taking essays, philistines like David Coleman threaten to overtake our discourse. Editors like Cheryl Strayed stand fast against them.

L.A. Confutational

Dennis M. Walsh, Nobody Walks: Bringing My Brother's Killers to Justice

In July 2003, two Los Angeles hoodlums shot tweaker Christopher Walsh in the head, stuffed his body in a plastic garbage barrel, and stowed his remains in a Van Nuys storage unit. His brother, defense attorney Dennis Walsh, swore vengeance on LA’s criminal underground, telling anybody who would listen, “Nobody walks on this case.” Little did he know he’d become the biggest scourge on the underworld since Charles Bronson.

Dennis Walsh tells his own story with the kinetic aggression that drives filmmakers like Scorsese and Tarantino. His brash, violent, gleefully profane narrative never lags, leaving readers feeling like they’ve been pummeled by a true master pummeler. And while his cast of thousands may demand intense attention to keep names straight (keep notes on the endpaper), his story of realistic sublegal crime fighting makes CSI look wimpy by comparison.

Walsh’s father was a Cleveland PD detective who got rich working the other side. A one-time rising star of California’s Irish mob, he led his many sons into “the life.” The only Walsh without a record, Dennis did a hitch in the Navy, completed his law degree, and went into private practice, keeping bottom-feeders out of the hoosegow. This strange dual life made him perfect to nvestigate crimes where police cannot venture.

Christopher Walsh, Dennis’ youngest brother, drifted through life, got hooked on meth, and spent his final days among tweakers who’d surrendered normal humanity. Nobody heard from him for weeks before his remains surfaced. Seems tweakers don’t interact outside their circle, even when somebody has to clean up the blood. Even less when it means talking to the police: everybody knew who killed Christopher, but nobody would sing for the LAPD.

An an attorney with longstanding underground connections, Dennis stood in a unique position to haunt his brother’s killers. In his trademark Cleveland Indians ballcap and jeans, he infiltrated California’s insular meth-head community; with his brother Tim at his side, tweakers began saying “the Walsh Brothers” like you might say “Sinn Fein.” But his sharp suits and avuncular silver curls gave him unique access to California’s byzantine legal system, too.

Walsh tells a gripping story, shifting between Wild West vigilante heroics among an essentially lawless community, and the tense compromises necessary from an officer of the courts. One moment, Walsh and his brothers may serve a beat-down on some Valley scum-sucker to nab new leads. The next, he walks careful lines in the LA criminal court, perennially trying to stay on deputy DA Stephanie Sparagna's good side.

While Walsh remains the hero of his story—dude, meth-heads shot his brother in the face—he doesn’t flinch from his ad hoc morality. As an unwanted guest in a community with no law and little order, he often has no choice but to solve problems with his fists and lie to his allies. When the LAPD proves ill-equipped for Christopher’s case, Dennis helpfully offers to distribute old-fashioned street justice.

Eventually, evidence in Christopher’s murder crisscrosses LA County, transcends economic class, and overlaps California’s many criminal subcultures. Arresting Christopher’s killers requires Faustian bargains, impromptu partnerships, and elaborate knife-edge dances between law enforcement agencies. When his drug-addled chief witness makes a deal with the US Marshals but has an LAPD warrant on his ass, Dennis uncorks diplomacy worthy of Churchill at Yalta.

Even when the cops have Christopher’s killers behind bars, Dennis’s journey isn’t over. On Law & Order, everything looks so neat: 24 minutes for arrest, 24 minutes for trial, and by the credits, they (almost) always have the guilty party in chains. Not so, says Walsh: enterprising defendants can impede the legal process for years, while witnesses age, memories fade, and evidence languishes. Christopher’s killers prove astute heel-draggers.

Nothing proves easy in this story. While working both the courts and the criminal underworld, Dennis must also control his criminal brothers, keep his sources from discovering one another, and remain a viable vigilante after everyone treats him like Batman. He never recovers the murder weapon. It may be in the concrete foundations of actor Ving Rhames’s house, demonstrating how this case binds SoCal glamour with postmodern urban decay.

Not everyone will like this story. Walsh’s intense, meteoric narrative requires acute attention, especially since he compresses events that actually occured some time and distance apart. His raunchy prose may bother some readers, particularly his frequent f-bombs and casual violence. But Walsh’s deeply cinematic story, bolstered by heartfelt investment in events over a decade later, gives him distinct power. This stark, unforgiving story won’t leave you easily.

Larry Woiwode on the Christian as Active Reader

During a brief e-mail exchange with Susannah Clements, we discussed whether any Christian literary theory exists today. Clements explained that “Among Christians themselves, there's some controversy over whether the theory approach is the best way of dealing with literature at all.” Christian criticism has focused on close reading and exegesis; theory, Christian critics believe, is too constraining.

I wondered whether I really believed this, until I discovered Larry Woiwode. Poet and novelist, Woiwode turns his hand to criticism in Words Made Fresh: Essays on Literature and Culture. And he proves that, to an artist, Christianity provides more than a tool to dismantle others’ work. Christianity gives us a vantage point from which to examine the larger world, one informed by a spirit of hope and clarity.

In ten essays, ranging from five to forty pages, Woiwode reads the world around him like a prophet, charged to uphold the admirable and disparage the inexcusable. This gives him a hard edge that may bother some readers, but it also gives him a real position, which I appreciate after years in academia, where equivocation has become necessary. Woiwode is refreshing because he actually stands for something.

And, unlike other bold Christians I've read recently, Woiwode opens doors without falsely attempting to close them. He takes sides, but does not believe (with one exception) that his positions conclude the debate. For Woiwode, Christianity and literature provide twinned opportunities to explore a larger and more exciting world than the alternative can provide.

Woiwode turns an impressive range of insight onto a range of subjects. Some, like John Updike and John Gardner, deal in areas which critics have exhausted. Gardner, whom Woiwode admits he knew and admired, merits two essays, one a sweeping remembrance, the other an in-depth examination of one novel so esoteric that most critics won’t touch it. Woiwode treats even such well-handled subjects with fresh vision.

Other topics seem more surprising. Comparing Bob Dylan and CNN as newsgatherers, he finds conventional journalism wanting in terms of speaking the truths that undergird events. He draws attention to a nearly forgotten aspect of novelist Reynolds Price’s corpus, innovative and sagacious translations of the Koine Gospels. And, in examination of America’s firearms culture, he finds this lineage as rich for examination as any literature.

Covering three decades in the author’s life, these essays provide a shifting intellectual biography, as Woiwode moves from his straightforward description of Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts, through a more aggressive stance on public education, to a remarkably mature and nuanced rumination on the truths inherent in Shakespeare’s tragedies. But these changes aren’t merely incidental. Woiwode’s development urges us to season our own thinking, too.

Larry Woiwode

As a Christian, Woiwode approaches criticism not supposing that we should grasp literature in its own right, but that literature can throw light on its readers and their calling. We can understand ourselves in relation to our neighbors and our God through the lens of great reading. Therefore he reads literature with intent to illuminate humans in culture, just as he reads culture as a manifestation of humanity’s better angels.

Don’t misunderstand the word “Christian.” Woiwode is broad-minded and inquisitive. In his discursion on Bob Dylan, he seems more interested in Dylan’s younger, more insurrectionary period than his later “Born Again” doldrums. He feels no need to discuss the highly moralistic John Gardner’s serial marriages. Woiwode would rather engage with God’s world than condemn those living in it.

This Christianity does get somewhat high-handed when he addresses the public sphere. Woiwode adopts the siege mentality that afflicts certain Evangelical churches, and occasionally lets it infect his criticism. He insists, for instance, that John Updike never won the Nobel Prize in part because of his professed Christianity. The Academy’s longstanding anti-Americanism seems a more likely explanation.

But that’s small beer. In only one essay does Woiwode let Christianity conflict with lucid thought. In “Deconstructing God,” an exhortation against secularization in public schools, he doesn’t seem to recognize his stated contradictions. If both 19th Century pietism and 20th Century secularism authorized public prejudices, why should we believe reenrolling God will alleviate the problem?

Besides, we know that nothing dampens students’ ardor for a topic like making it mandatory.

That limitation notwithstanding, Woiwode provides a good model for how the Christian engages critically with the word and the world. His curiosity and insight, leavened with dry humor, make reading him both educational and pleasant. If more critics, and more Christians, wrote like this, criticism might attract a broader, brighter audience.

Mike Smith Saves the World from the Weather

Living in Tornado Alley, I’ve often felt grateful for the loud sirens and TV’s color-coded Doppler radar displays. Meteorologist Mike Smith, who pioneered many of the technologies that have saved lives in the nation’s midland, looks back over a pathbreaking career, and decades of weather history, in his debut book, Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather.

I didn’t realize that, as recently as the 1950s, the Weather Bureau—now the National Weather Service—not only didn’t predict tornadoes and hurricanes; they flatly forbid such forecasts. They feared you and I were too irrational to handle such knowledge. Hundreds of people sat blindly unaware in the path of truly horrific weather because the government thought public panic was riskier than mass destruction.

Members of my generation grew up with the idea that weather prediction was a reliable applied science, that forecasts would continue to improve, and that we had a right to know when destructive weather menaced our homes. Smith combines history and memoir to describe the changes that made such an attitude possible.

Smith pays particular attention to tornadoes. As a survivor of the 1957 Ruskin Heights tornado, which killed dozens and flattened a Kansas City suburb, Smith demonstrates particular affinity for tornadoes. This played out in his early career when, as a young weatherman, he failed to utilize the newest technology and left much of Oklahoma City vulnerable to a significant tornado outbreak.

Throughout history, humans have stood vulnerable to weather phenomena. Only recently have we had technology to plan for the weather in any concrete way. Victims of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane or the Great Hurricane of 1780 had no warning before their homew washed out to sea. When Dorothy trembled before the gruesome twister, that was no literary device. People literally lived in fear of the weather.

Our technology also makes us vulnerable to weather in entirely new ways. Smith spends several chapters on Delta Flight 191, which got caught in a controversial phenomenon called a “microburst,” a highly localized storm that pushes cold, wet air into the ground with such force that a jumbo jet could get sucked along like driftwood. Only high tech could leave us at the mercy of such weather.

Smith believes that technology also frees us from such risks. Hundreds of people died in air disasters caused by microbursts, but not since 1994. We have the ability to recognize and anticipate such risks in a way we couldn’t in 1985, when Delta 191 flew through what the captain thought was just the rain.

And that’s what Smith means when he says science has tamed the weather. We have the knowledge to spot disasters in advance, steer the most vulnerable out of the path of destruction, and prevent loss of life. Though weather remains beyond our control, we no longer have to live in fear of wind and water.

In one telling thread, Smith compares the 1955 Udall, Kansas, tornado, with a nearly identical outbreak that hit Greensburg, Kansas, in 2007. The two tornadoes followed such similar paths that, superimposed, you could easily confuse one tornado for the other. Each flattened the towns. Yet Greensburg’s residents survived to rebuild; Udall, as Smith says, “died in its sleep.” This story isn’t just informative; it’s touching.

Strangely, though we regard the weather as the ultimate impersonal truth, Smith describes the controversies that actually accrue to weather prediction. Personalities like Robert Miller and Ted Fujita have polarized the meteorological community. Though these debates linger outside public view, they have forced their way into how we perceive the weather, and how we shield ourselves from it.

Fujita’s theories, for instance, have entered popular culture through the movie Twister, to which Smith returns time and again. We toss around terms like F-4 and F-5 casually, as we did this year following the Joplin tornado, without realizing the battles that went into this scale’s general acceptance. Ted Fujita faced resistance throughout that seems appallingly unscientific to outsiders.

Smith skillfully makes this and other controversies seem not just important, but exciting. Meteorology, in his telling, has the same bare-knuckle energy we see in politics or sports. These battles, many of which Smith himself fought in, reveal how much of our modern, weather-safe lifestyle is contingent on personalities, and could have gone another way.

While weather forecasters often appear starchy and bland, Smith makes the weather into an urgent concern, and a remarkable victory. This story turns the weather into a quest, and meteorologists into the most unlikely heroes in recent literature.

Critic of the Week—Tex Sample

I once walked into a hometown blue-collar bar, took a table, and fired up my Kindle to catch up on my reading.  After a few moments, silence fell over the bar.  Other than Waylon Jennings on the jukebox, all sounds had diminished to a whisper, as the flannel-clad drinkers stared at me like I’d taken off my jeans in public.  I never returned to that bar.

I should have read Tex Sample.  In Living With Will Rogers, Uncle Remus, & Minnie Pearl, Sample identifies the gap between the “literate culture,” people like me who perceive the world through words and documents, and the “oral culture,” which prizes folk wisdom, oral heritage, and tradition.  He finds remarkable fonts of untapped wisdom in the oral culture.  But he also sees significant cultural conflict.

A product of rural oral upbringing himself, Sample encountered the conflict in college, where professors passed information through documents and artifacts.  This allowed greater nuance, but discussion often bogged down in extraneous implications.  Oral culture people, he says, pass tiny nuggets of wisdom that lack finesse but permit quick decision.  This ability to think and work at the same time gives oral people a distinct edge.

Yet literary people often hold power in oral people’s lives.  We often sign their paychecks, pull their strings, and demand unquestioning loyalty.  Though they don’t have elaborate critical names for this behavior, oral people recognize colonial exploitation when they see it, and they resist.  They exercise remarkable power in their ability to drag their heels, spread gossip, and just refuse.

Sample, a career theologian, writes primarily for pulpit preachers, who often have graduate degrees but lead congregations of diverse background.  But only occasionally do his words limit themselves to a church context.  His wisdom of lives lived on society’s margins can enlighten teachers, lawyers, businessmen, and anyone who must cross that culture gap.

Lives of the Saints: Three Memoirs

When Eliyahu Teichberg left his domineering Momma and repressive Brooklyn upbringing, he successfully reinvented himself as Elliot Tiber. But while Greenwich Village welcomed a struggling gay Jewish student in ways Bensonhurst couldn’t, Tiber still hadn’t found meaning in life. Palm Trees on the Hudson describes how, in those pre-Stonewall years, interior decorating opened Manhattan’s glitziest doors—but one shady job nearly undid everything.

With dry wit and a keen eye for detail, Tiber recreates the transition from his Bensonhurst boyhood to the razzle-dazzle world awaiting one short subway ride away. Finding his identity isn’t easy in that culture, but several chance encounters put him in the hands of vivacious mentors and eager sponsors. Each little victory lets him discover that much more of the self lingering under the repressions of his conventional upbringing.

But Tiber’s sassy Momma never strays far from his heart. His struggles to win her approval loom as large as his victories in the cutthroat interior decorating world. Whenever Momma manages to bring him down, he finds solace in his life’s only constant: Judy Garland. So when a big commission lets him meet his idol, while evading Momma, he grabs it, getting the chance to meet Judy barely a year before her sudden, untimely death.

Too bad Tiber’s boss proves to have deep Mob connections. Suddenly, Tiber can only flee to the one place he’s constantly avoided.

Tiber’s highs and lows echo Pat Cooper’s life. How Dare You Say How Dare Me! dishes dirt on the richest comedy career you’ve never heard of. He didn’t hit the limelight until after thirty, but boy did he make it. If Cooper’s name rings no bells, it’s because he’s done little TV or film. He’s spent his life perfecting the possibilities of the stage, and along the way, he’s met famous names he doesn’t blush to drop on these pages.

Born Pasquale Caputo, Cooper too grew up resisting his conservative Brooklyn family. But rather than fleeing, Cooper mined them for comedy. He perfected outrage comedy before it was hip, and his laser-like dissection of society’s deep-seated issues gave him a ready-made audience. Unfortunately, he also had enemies, because every joke ruffled somebody’s feathers.

As he rocketed to comedy’s upper echelons, he managed to offend every ethnic group, every community, and every musical act he ever opened for. But the same gags that PO’ed big-name stars won over audiences, so he just kept climbing. It seems like, the more special interests he angered, the more bookings he got, with bigger paychecks and more eager audiences.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of his career, Cooper managed to alienate his first wife and their kids—a breach he still hasn’t healed. His family has orchestrated an Internet campaign to hold Cooper responsible for his past bad choices. Several portions of this memoir seem notably defensive, so if you wonder why, Google his name. You decide whose story you believe.

The past haunts the best of us. Musician and humorist Reggie Dabbs has learned that the hard way, and also learned how to face his ghosts. REGGIE tells the story of a man who started off with less than nothing, and made something of himself.

In second grade, Dabbs learned he’d been adopted. His biological mother, a sixteen-year-old dropout with three other kids, made a desperate bargain to feed the kids she already had. For the next several years, he struggled to understand his own identity. Along the way, he discovered that his past might be fixed, but his future was his to mold.

A lifelong struggle with weight caused Dabbs endless grief until his build made him a football star. Then he discovered untapped saxophone talent. Suddenly he had a skill that could pay the bills. But chance revealed the one talent that would come to define him, while letting him come to grips with his past: he proved to be a master at telling a touching life story.

Where Cooper writes for jokes, and Tiber writes for insights, Dabbs hopes you’ll learn from his life. He makes parallels between his life and great events, literature, the Bible, superheroes, and more. Sometimes he resembles a Sunday sermon, but when he does, he pulls back, tells an apropos joke, and reminds us we all live in the here and now.

Despite some rocky moments, these three memoirs, in their own ways, remind us that each life is made of possibility. And each memoir is packed with laughs. Keep living, folks; these guys show you how.