Polar fever

The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture

by Michael F. Robinson ’89

(University of Chicago Press, 2006)

This highly readable history begins with Robert Peary in the early 1880s, on the brink of his celebrated polar expeditions, telling a friend that he aspired to a life “free from discussions, from entanglements, from social complications.” He chose to “go it alone” as an Arctic explorer, he said. On his final expedition, in 1908, go-it-alone Peary steamed ahead with 19 officers and crew members, 49 Eskimos, and 246 dogs. Not quite the lone Arctic explorer of popular imagination, Peary also depended on large networks of supporters back home, including wealthy patrons. An assistant professor at the University of Hartford, Robinson is not simply looking to upend another individualist saga. His book, rather, is about “entanglements” between polar exploration and American culture from 1850 to 1910; his purpose to “paint a new portrait of these men, one that removes them from the icy backdrop of the Arctic and sets them within the local tempests of American life.” It becomes a shifting portrait. Early Arctic explorers such as Elisha Kane built their closest alliances with elite scientists and other “men of character,” often lecturing before scholarly associations as well as in small-town lyceums; later explorers catered, instead, to newspaper magnates, book publishers, and the millions of Americans who paid to see them (“with noisy retinues of Eskimos and dogs,” as Robinson deftly narrates) at world’s fairs and traveling shows. Mass culture was burgeoning, and a public appetite for scandal would end up devouring these adventurers, who were not all “men of character.” Aside from an enticing last thought relating “Arctic fever” to the American space program, Robinson hews closely to his time line, maybe too closely. Still, I couldn’t help but see the entertainment-soaked culture of our day forming in the “coldest crucible.”

Tangled roots

Family Tree

by Barbara Delinsky, MA’69

(Doubleday, 2007)

Hugh Clarke, a thirtysomething Boston lawyer, comes from a New England family ever conscious of its illustrious history reaching back to the Mayflower. And so, the blue bloods are beside themselves when Hugh’s wife, Dana, gives birth to a daughter who is undeniably beautiful—and copper-toned. Hugh and his family are not bigots, in the unsubtle sense; they are self-consciously liberal. But for them, politics becomes intolerably personal when Lizzie turns up, and the Clarkes heap their suspicions of faithlessness upon salt-of-the-earth Dana, as white-skinned as Hugh, but from a middling family with an uncertain past. Fomented by his family, Hugh subjects Dana to a round of testing to make sure she did not conceive the child with the divorced black orthopedist who lives next door. When Hugh’s paternity is confirmed, the pot boils as he and Dana go searching in her family tree for forbidden fruit, trusting, of course, that the Clarke lineage has been definitively marked out by Hugh’s historian-father, Eaton, author of a forthcoming book about his prized pedigree. The ultimate denouement is hardly surprising, and yet Delinsky’s novel is about the unexpected, about people who are not who they think they are, or what they seem to be. “She isn’t us,” Hugh tells Dana as their baby sleeps in the hospital room. Dana replies, “Isn’t us? Or just isn’t the us we know?” I wouldn’t call Family Tree an exploration of race. I’d call it a good read, a likable story with a bundled plot. Delinsky (whose master’s from Boston College is in sociology) made her name as a best-selling romance novelist, and she deserves cheers for taking on more in this book than her devoted public might have asked for.

Other wise

Sons of the Church: The Witnessing of Gay Catholic Men

by Thomas Stevenson, MA’86

(Harrington Park Press, 2006)

The words “objectively disordered,” branding homosexuality as such, turn up on these pages more than once—their source a Vatican statement issued some years ago by a redoubtable theologian who now sits in the Chair of Peter. But Stevenson, who uses a series of 44 interviews with gay Catholic men to try and explain how someone (like him) can be both honestly gay and faithfully Catholic, does not fixate on such things, and there isn’t a breath of resentment in his voice. Expecting to find a fair amount of anger among his interview subjects, most of whom were living in the Midwest, he tells how he was surprised by the joy he heard in conversations that took place over four years, beginning in 2000. He chooses to call these men “witnesses” because they try to come to grips with their homosexuality by “returning to the source of their faith,” which is, in Stevenson’s telling, the God who is present in their lives. His writing is crisp and mercifully free of the abstruseness that must stalk him as a philosophy and religion professor who has taught at undisclosed colleges. He taxed my sympathy in saying that one-night stands can be occasions of moral and spiritual transcendence—although his take-home point was that self-hatred and despair are what drive gay men to sexual acting out. Stevenson also critiques what he bills as the “absolutization of gayness”—a manifestation of the all-too-human tendency “to take part of life and turn it into the whole.” In the end, he cuts to the question of how these “witnesses” reconcile their homosexuality with their Catholicism. As he explains, they simply make distinctions between what is essential to their faith and what is not. In short, God’s love is central to them; “objectively disordered” is not.

Armed and free

Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy

by Joan Burbick ’68

(New Press, 2006)

In researching this book, Burbick traveled to gun shows in eight states, talking to gun owners, sellers, lobbyists, and others who see firearms possession as the essential mark of American freedom. Her book is a story about the making of the modern gun movement, and the most distasteful part of this tale is race. Turns out that many people began buying guns and calling for unfettered gun rights in reaction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which they saw as ultimately threatening to themselves and social order. Burbick, a professor of English and American studies at Washington State University (an excerpt from her book Rodeo Queens appeared in this magazine in 2003), speaks as an observer, a “casual shooter,” and a fervent social critic—and these voices grow dissonant in this book. She introduces the reader, almost sympathetically, to not-quite charming characters, like the man who told her, “Whenever I get mad at the government, I go out and buy a gun.” And she writes candidly of her personal attraction to guns, including the .40 Sig Sauer pistol she covets, noting that the weapon “was adopted by the Air Marshals after 9/11.” But she also fumes: “The gun protects the interests of rabid capitalism . . . the gun functions to further racial repression, economic disparity, and war.” How these views are reconciled within her alert mind remains an interesting question.

William Bole

William Bole is a writer in the Boston area

A list of recently published books by alumni, students, and faculty is maintained at bcm.bc.edu/readerslist. Publishing houses and authors are invited to send books or book announcements to the editors.

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