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the year in books

May 13, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

My bookshelves are beyond capacity. As the year as a Knight Science Journalism fellow comes to a close, I take short jaunts back to the Cape, carrying boxes full of paperbacks and hardcovers that encapsulate the year. Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air by David J.C. MacKay and David Archer’s The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate from Dan Schrag’s The Consequences of Energy Systems class. The hefty tome Magnum Contact Sheets, Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans, and the playful Seeing Things: A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz, all for B.D. Colen’s photojournalism class. Sophia Roosth’s new book Synthetic: How Life Got Made. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Knight Science Journalism Tagged With: books, Cambridge, Isaac Asimov, Knight Science Journalism

return to oregon! KLCC

October 28, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2015-10-28 at 11.11.07 AMI’ve landed on the West Coast just as my interview with Eric Alan of KLCC‘s gone live. Have a listen. Or better yet, if you’re nearby, come say hello as I do two events in that southern stretch of the Willamette Valley that I once called home.

I’ll be speaking at University of Oregon tomorrow afternoon at 4:00 (Straub Hall, Room 145. 1451 Onyx Street, Eugene, OR), in an event hosted by the Department of Geography, Barbara & Carlisle Moore Professor of English Fund, School of Journalism & Communications, Hearst Foundation Visiting Professionals Endowment Fund, Department of Sociology, Robert D. Clark Honors College, and the University of Oregon Bookstore. Details here.

And on Sunday, I’ll be down in my old stomping grounds of Cottage Grove, speaking at the Axe and Fiddle (657 E Main St, Cottage Grove, OR) at 7:00 pm. Details here.

More events coming up in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Miami. Then…India! Full schedule here.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, readings Tagged With: A River Runs Again, book tour, books, Elemental India, Oregon, radio

A River Runs Again (aka Elemental India)

May 26, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

For years now I’ve been referring to the book I’ve been working on as Elemental India. It still may retain that title when it comes out in India, but here in the United States, now that the manuscript is handed in, the facts checked and checked again, the galleys scanned for typos, and the cover art completed, it is time for a rechristening. Somewhere along the way, it became A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka. The team at PublicAffairs have been amazing to work with and we’re all looking forward to August 25th, when it shall be released. Stay tuned for news on book launch and fall events, and don’t hesitate to be in touch if you have ideas or suggestions.

Kirkus Reviews was the first to respond to the book: [Read more…]

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india Tagged With: A River Runs Again, books, Elemental India, reviews

must india ravage to rise?

October 4, 2012 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

My double book review was just published in Caravan magazine, looking at Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari, and Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars, Vandana Shiva’s latest. It’s loaded with (unanswerable) questions.

Is there nothing between the sleepy socialism of India’s first decades that admittedly did little to raise the standard of living for most Indians and the sell-out spree of the recent past that has created a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots? What happened in the half-century between political independence gained and economic independence relinquished?

Read the piece here.

 

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: books, conservation, india, pesticides, resources, reviews, science, water

get this book

August 23, 2011 By Meera Leave a Comment

Such a pleasure to finally hold a hard-bound book of Sharlet’s essays in my hands, the true stories he’s held closest to his heart, collecting on the side as he worked on The Family and C Street. Knowing Jeff, I’ve read some of these before, on screen at KillingTheBuddha.com (a site he founded and I continue to help edit) and amid the ephemeral pages of Rolling Stone and Harper’s. But between the covers of Sweet Heaven When I Die, on thick stock, they’re richer with the re-reading. For the many essays that were new to me, I got a fresh look at what I’ve always loved about his writing, the anti-scripture of a man who is crazy about a world that drives him mad, in love with ordinary people around us that he can see are larger than life. The comparison to Joan Didion is apt. He writes passages like this, from the tale of a college love from Colorado and a return visit to see her years later:

She thought she might study religion. She bought herself a concordance. She would sit cross-legged on the floor, the concordance’s giant pages spread on her lap like the wings of a gull, a cup of wine or a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a Marlboro in the other. Her back curved like calligraphy—she had worn a brace as a girl, and her legs were a bit crooked, and her toes wrapped onto one another because when she was little she’d refused to abandon a pair of shoes that she’d loved—and she would parse scripture.

Read Sweet Heaven because you love words and stories. Read because you long and love. Read Sweet Heaven because you believe, or wish you did.

Buy this book, for yourself and a friend.

Filed Under: killing the buddha Tagged With: books, reviews

the lingering loveliness of long things

January 14, 2011 By Meera Leave a Comment

Published today on Killing the Buddha…



Last Friday night, a man late in his years and a recent recipient of news about his body that no man wants to hear, leaned in close to me and asked me a question. The air was heavy with mortality, and its twin emotion, love. What his question was is irrelevant, but the answer, I realize as I sit down to write about a marathon public reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick last weekend, is not. My answer was about how I cherish the quiet spaces in life. Time without interruption. Time for deep conversations or a sensuous focus on a single subject. Time to get into the grit of life, and let it unfold. I am decidedly of the mind that that’s where all the good stuff happens. I also feel like these moments, in our hyper-communicative lives, are becoming extremely rare. We share more, with more people, but we stay on the surface of an unfathomable ocean.

At noon the next day, I stepped into a space that felt deep and from some other time. The approach, rumbling down cobblestone streets, helped. The entrance to the new Bedford Whaling Museum was plugged with people, some (including myself) laden with sleeping bags and backpacks of snacks. It was the fifteenth annual Moby-Dick Marathon, a non-stop reading of the epic tale from the site of Melville’s own departure on a whaling ship in 1841. My friends and I were in it for the long haul. I, I must admit, had never read the book. I knew it was about a ship, and an obsessive captain, and a whale.

And so I learned about Ishmael and Ahab and the white whale and their adventures. For more than a day, it was just voices. One after the other, 180 readers stepped up to the mic for a ten-minute stretch each over the course of 25 contiguous hours. You could look at the number affixed to their sleeve and then the program and perhaps figure out who they were: notables such as Barney Frank (MA congressman) or Peter Whittemore (great-great-grandson of Melville), or simply “Retiree” or “Melville Aficionado.”  Though we moved venues a couple of times, mostly we were settled in the museum’s Jacob’s Family Gallery, transformed into a space of words and whispers. Whale skeletons, suspended from the ceiling, hung over our heads. A blue whale exuded oil from its bones that collected in a small flask that would take decades to fill.

Nearing midnight, the crowd had thinned. I had signed up as a substitute reader, placed my own S-14 label on my arm and it was as I was getting sleepy that one of the organizers rested a hand on my shoulder and asked me to read. As I stood at one podium listening to the prior reader finish and awaiting my cue to begin, I saw that it was snowing outside and I smiled. And then with his nod, I began to read of the “power and malice” of sperm whales, as noted by our young sailor. Call me, not Ismael, but a romantic; I felt like I was taking part in some small yet wondrous bit of history.

For reading aloud is a dying art. When did you last read something, more than a snippet from the newspaper, to someone close to you? When was the last time you had something read to you? A poem? An essay? A book? A long book? Jeff Sharlet, who founded this website, (and, it’s not unrelated, named his blog, “Call Me Ishmael.”), was once my professor. He made us stand at the podium and read our work aloud to each other. “Go to book readings,” he commanded. “As writers, they are your church services.” Some of the readers in New Bedford were born preachers, in this respect. They read neither too slow nor too fast. They lingered over words. They savored the stage directions of punctuation. Others were young, or inexperienced, or melodramatic. The resulting flavors were humorous (when an English captain took on a thick Brooklyn brogue) or painful (when the most basic words were mispronounced), yet there was always something fabulously democratic about the mélange. Our lack of reading aloud, or perhaps more accurately, our lack of listening, is the death of our pronunciation. Moby-Dick is advanced; there are deceptive nautical terms where only half the letters are pronounced and 25-cent words galore. When they were spoken correctly, they sang. We listeners learned.



The other blessed thing of these epic events, these extended spaces of quiet, is the stages they pass through. In the beginning, hundreds of us were in a room filled with the Lagoda, a half-scale model of a whaling bark, its mast inches from the cathedral-height ceiling. We moved to the Seaman’s Bethel across the street for the sermon section, sitting in the stiff wooden pews where Melville once sat, listening to a real-life pastor play the part of Reverend Mapple as he thundered the story of Job from a boat prow pulpit. We returned to the museum and settled into the Jacob’s Gallery, taking short forays into the theater and another exhibition room to surround a sperm whale skeleton for a soliloquy on cetology. The hours ticked on. People came and went. By three in the morning, there were fifteen people sitting in folding chairs and another dozen snuggled in sleeping bags in the upper corridor. I slept myself, on and off, and then periodically leaned up, book in hand, and resumed listening. As light began to stream in the window, a new wave of people arrived with coffee cups in hand, stomping fresh snow from their boots.

But the movement in body was minimal, not more than 20 or 30 minutes spent in transition, the rest in continual reading, page to page, chapter to chapter, reader to reader. The audience was hushed. Attentive. There were a few Kindles and iPads, but those with computers were rare and tended to tuck themselves away into far corners. A few women knitted. Most of the audience bent over copies of the book, their own—dog-eared and pencil-marked—or borrowed from the museum. If we spoke at all, it was in a whisper. I learned nothing about the friends of friends I was with until we buckled up in the car for the ride back to Boston early Sunday afternoon.

Except for the brief time when we crossed the street to the Seaman’s Bethel, I had not left the museum but once. A spell was broken as a friend and I stepped into the cold morning in search of a coffee. Early on in Moby-Dick, Ishmael talks about the love of extended stays on sea, far from daily news.

For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks….

I imagine the quiet of the sea, the drama only in moments of storms or the slaughtering of whales. As the barista fixes my coffee, I glance at the newspaper lying in wait. A massacre in Tuscon. We leave, return to the museum and the sacred space within, find solace, and escape, in the auditory marvel of a story well told.

Filed Under: killing the buddha Tagged With: books, moby-dick

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