Book reviews
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-14 09:19
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Magnificent Desolation
By Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham, published by Bloomsbury/Crown
Forty years ago next week, on July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin became arguably the most famous second-place finisher in history, when he stepped onto the moon 20 minutes behind Neil Armstrong. Apparently, it galled. In a 1973 memoir, Return to Earth, Aldrin wrote that he had always striven to please his domineering father, and that he had gone into a tailspin of depression since failing to become the first man on the moon. (According to NASA's protocol at the time, Aldrin, as lunar module pilot, should have gone first and Armstrong, as commander, should have stayed behind to man the space capsule. But for technical reasons - and historical ones - the order was shuffled before the Apollo 11 mission.)
Now Aldrin is back with another memoir, Magnificent Desolation, that covers new ground, from his alcoholism and divorces to his sobriety and newfound love. It also aims to correct the historical record.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes, published by Pantheon Books
In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page. Richard Holmes, the pre-eminent biographer of the Romantic generation and the author of intensely intimate lives of Shelley and Coleridge, now turns his attention to what Coleridge called the "second scientific revolution," when British scientists circa 1800 made electrifying discoveries to rival those of Newton and Galileo. In Holmes' view, "wonder"-driven figures like the astronomer William Herschel, the chemist Humphry Davy and the explorer Joseph Banks brought "a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work" and "produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science."
A Happy Marriage
By Rafael Yglesias, published by Scribner
Let's face it: Happiness is banal. We may desire loving relationships in real life - if you believe the magazines, anyway - but in literature, they make for dull and static prose. So if a novel begins with a happy couple, things usually sour by the end.
A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias, begins in the 1970s, on the night the 21-year-old Enrique Sabas meets Margaret Cohen in his Greenwich Village apartment. "He had ordered her in," the opening sentence provokes, like "takeout Chinese".
A mutual friend has driven Enrique crazy by talking endlessly about this "extraordinary" woman but failing to define what makes her so special. Enrique - who sold his first novel at the wildly precocious age of 16, then dropped out of high school to write full time - prizes precise language and believes nothing is so ephemeral it cant be pinned down in words.
He goads his friend into producing the mystery woman by declaring that she must not exist. The stakes are high, but after just one night of cheap wine, unfiltered Camels and witty banter, "Margaret, or at least her bright blue eyes, ... snapped his brittle heart."