2010 Co-Ed Book Selection List

The following are the book choices for the 2010 Co-Ed Book Club Meeting. Voting will take place at the 2009 Co-Ed meeting, scheduled for December 2, 2009 at Jan & Rob's.

Your choices (in no particular order):
Inventing Niagara by G. Strand
River Horse: Across America by Boat by W. L. Heat-Moon
The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases by R. Donaldson
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by M. Chabon
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by J. Barendt


Additional information:

• Inventing Niagara by G. Strand

With wit and passion, Strand (Flight: A Novel) explores the history of Niagara Falls and shows that the famous natural wonder is in reality a prime example of man's manipulation of nature, constantly exploited to attract tourists. In the 19th century, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, appalled by the crass commercialism of souvenir shops, ugly signs and cheap attractions, pledged to restore Niagara to its natural beauty; instead, he created a fake wilderness. In the 20th century, humans learned to control the falls by harnessing them for electric power, and this led to what is for Strand the most shocking fakery: the water going over the falls is manipulated for greater output in the daytime—to impress visitors—and turned down at night to generate more power. In addition, the capacity to generate large amounts of hydroelectricity has made Niagara Falls a prime spot for industries that manufacture electrochemical products and for nuclear weapons facilities; the author paints a vivid picture of a region awash today in toxic waste and radioactive contaminants. Strand's provocative and iconoclastic book says much about how America has dominated nature, despoiled it and shrouded the offense in myth.

• River Horse: Across America by Boat by W. L. Heat-Moon

Writing under the name Heat-Moon (Blue Highways), William Trogdon once again sets out across America, this time propelled chiefly by a dual-outboard boat dubbed Nikawa, "River Horse" in Osage. In this hardy craft, he and a small crew attempt to travel more than 5000 miles by inland waterways from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a single season. Citing 19th-century travelogues and dredging odd bits of the rivers' past, Heat-Moon conveys the significance of passing "beneath a bridge that has looked down on the stovepipe hat of Abraham Lincoln, the mustache of Mark Twain, the sooty funnels of a hundred thousand steamboats." Though at first he is struck by how river travel is "so primordial, so unchanged in its path," he later notes that the only thing Lewis and Clark would recognize on a dammed and severely altered stretch of the Missouri River is the bedeviling prairie wind. But what remains constant for him is "the greatest theme in our history: the journey."

• The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases by R. Donaldson

Donaldson is a medical cowboy, chasing viruses in Africa, but also a UCLA medical prof and ER doc. This book is a wild and extraordinary memoir of his 2003 summer in Sierra Leone as a naïve medical student studying Lassa fever (a close cousin of the Ebola virus). Donaldson gives passionate and powerful reportage on a struggling clinic treating villagers and refugees from neighboring war-torn Liberia suffering from the devastating and often fatal illness. What inspired the adventure was the work of Dr. Aniru Conteh (who died in 2004), the hero at the heart of the story, whose Lassa ward served thousands despite the lack of equipment, medicine and staff. For a week, Donaldson, untried and unsure, was left to treat the desperately ill patients alone—a test that turned a frightened student into a caring, if not altogether confident, young doctor. Despite a slow start, this astounding story of the seemingly insurmountable barriers to public health in a Third World country revs up into an irresistible tale of discovery, courage and kindness.

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by M. Chabon
  

Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.

• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by J. Barendt

John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success. (One resident into whose orbit Berendt fell, the Lady Chablis, went on to become a minor celebrity in her own right.) But equally important was Berendt's depiction of Savannah socialite Jim Williams as he stands trial for the murder of Danny Hansford, a moody, violence-prone hustler--and sometime companion to Williams--characterized by locals as a "walking streak of sex." So feel free to call it a "true crime classic" without a trace of shame.