Paolo Pellegrin - Transformer or Transcriber?

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "In Search of the Sublime"

Ben Taub, in his absorbing “In Search of the Sublime" (The New Yorker, May 23, 2022), a profile of photographer Paolo Pellegrin, mentions that, in 2019, Pellegrin joined him “in documenting an expedition to send a manned submersible to the deepest point in each ocean.” I vividly recall that piece. Titled “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” it appeared in the May 18, 2020 New Yorker. It was my choice for best reporting piece of 2020 (see here). It contained several striking black-and-white photos by Pellegrin, including this one:

Pellegrin’s photos for Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” are notable for their matter-of-factness. They don’t transform their subjects; they transcribe them – clearly, precisely, concretely. They show them exactly as they are (albeit in black and white). That’s why I like them so much. And that’s why I’m surprised by some of the things that Pellegrin says about his art in Taub’s profile of him. For example, Taub quotes him as saying about his photography project in Namibia: “Yes, of course it’s about landscapes and nature, but I have to transform it,” he said. “It has to become something else, or else it doesn’t really work for what I’m trying to do or say. You have to, in a sense, go beyond—especially when it’s very beautiful.”

Really? Looking at Pellegrin’s wonderful “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” photos, I would never have pegged him as a “transformer.” Perhaps different projects call for different approaches. I prefer Pellegrin’s “transcriber” mode, when he regards his subjects as they are. 

May 23, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “The Captive City,” a report on how the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol fell under Russian control. Here’s a sample:

The next morning, Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers were in the streets. Soldiers seized city hall, the regional administration building, and the headquarters of the Ukrainian security service, the S.B.U. “Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla¬dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

It takes incredible guts to stand up to the Russians. Anyone who does so, as Yaffa shows, runs the risk of being abducted, tortured, and murdered. Yaffa goes to Zaporizhzhia, the first destination for people fleeing southern Ukraine, and talks with three citizens of Melitopol who refused to cave. One of them is Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, who was imprisoned by the Russians, interrogated, and pushed to transfer his authority to a pro-Russian city-council member. Yaffa writes,

Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-¬ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But Fedorov holds out. On March 16, he’s freed; the Russians exchange him for nine Russian prisoners of war. 

Yaffa visits the parking lot of a big-box store in Zaporizhzhia, which serves as a “one-stop welcome-and-processing center for those coming from occupied territories in the south.” He writes,

While hanging around the Epicenter’s parking lot, I met the members of a convoy of buses and cars that had managed to depart Melitopol. Space on the buses was so limited that some people rode in the cargo holds of tractor trailers. Just about every car was stuffed with more people than it could sensibly fit; parents had held their children in their laps as they jostled along the road. Many drivers had taped handmade signs reading “children” to the windows.

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Yaffa’s “The Captive City” is the latest in his series of dispatches on the war in Ukraine. Others are “A Sleepless Night of Russian Airstrikes in Ukraine” (February 24, 2022), “War Comes to Kyiv” (February 26, 2022), “Days of War” (March 7, 2022), “The Siege” (March 21, 2022), and “The Siege of Chernihiv” (April 15, 2022). All are excellent. 

David Salle's "Going on Her Nerve"

Rose Wylie, I Like To Be (2020)

I love ekphrasis – the written description of a work of art. There are two wonderful examples of it in David Salle’s recent “Going on Her Nerve” (The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2022), a review of the exhibition “Rose Wylie: Which One” (David Zwirner, April 28 – June 12, 2021):

1. One painting in particular will exemplify what I mean. At more than ten feet long, I Like To Be (2020) shows two female figures facedown in water. The one near the top edge is engaged in some sort of breaststroke, limbs bent like the legs of a crab, the bottom of her bathing suit poufing out like a baby’s diaper, her thick black lines of coiled hair semi-floating in the green, foamy water. Her body, outlined in viscous strokes of carmine-red oil paint, could be a bathing-suit-wearing crustacean: there she floats, oblivious to our gaze. The lower bather, also face-down, is cropped in half by the canvas’s bottom edge, and her body is fantastically elongated, stretching across the painting’s entire width, her mass of black hair surging improbably forward, while her right arm, disproportionately shrunken, is cut off at the point at which it plunges into the water. It’s the image we have in the mind’s eye as we push away from the wall of the pool, arms outstretched before us as we glide through the water—the sensation of the streamlined body getting longer. Two swimmers facedown in a wide green sea, one half crab and the other mostly squid, poised amid the horizontal brushstrokes of sea-foam green, with I LIKE TO BE in chunky black letters giving voice to the emotion. It’s a thrilling picture; I’m tempted to have the words tattooed on my biceps.

2. The Zwirner show contained one of the weirdest paintings I’ve seen in years: Illuminated Manuscript, Adam and Eve (2020). A medium-sized vertical canvas is bisected by an ocher-colored tree flanked by a female figure on the left and a male figure on the right. This is Adam and Eve as you’ve never seen them before: Eve is roughly the shape of a carrot, with a face like Popeye’s and what looks like a shower cap on her shrunken head. A pair of breasts flaccidly descend to meet two shoulder-less Gumby arms. Adam has broad shoulders but the same rubbery arms, one of which ends in an upturned hand that resembles an elephant’s trunk. Both figures are painted in the same raw sienna as the tree, with a little darker ocher here and there, and all are outlined in a dark red. Where the genitals—or fig leaves, in the medieval renditions—would be, Wylie has supplied broad swaths of pale yellow paint applied in vigorously clumsy strokes, as if she’s scrubbing a floor, and the same yellow paint wraps itself diagonally around the tree, becoming a de facto yellow serpent.

That “Two swimmers facedown in a wide green sea, one half crab and the other mostly squid, poised amid the horizontal brushstrokes of sea-foam green, with I LIKE TO BE in chunky black letters giving voice to the emotion” is inspired! The entire piece is inspired – one of the best art reviews of the year!

Rereadings: Whitney Balliett's "Night Creature"

This is the second in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Whitney Balliett’s wonderful Night Creature (1981). 

Night Creature is a journal of jazz, covering a five-year period, 1975 – 1980. The first entry is dated September 26, 1975; the last is dated July 6, 1980. Many of the entries originally appeared as columns or parts of columns in The New Yorker. I relish the flexibility of the journal format. You can fill it with just about anything – notes, comments, reviews, profiles, interviews. And that’s exactly what Balliett did in Night Creature. Here’s a sampling: 

On March 1, 1977, Balliett is at Café Carlyle to hear pianist George Shearing:

Tonight, he played John Lewis’s “Django” so that its stubborn, complex melodic structure took on – for the first time in memory – a melancholy, lullaby quality. He made “Django” an evening meditation on the great guitarist. He did the same thing for Garner’s “Misty.” It became a cheerful ballad, and three-dimensional Garner – not a parody but a distillation. One was surprised to look up midway and discover not Garner but Shearing, with his big, swinging face, his dark glasses collecting the light, his chin plunging down-right, down-right, down-right.

On March 25, 1977, he’s at Bradley’s to hear pianist Dave McKenna: 

McKenna’s left hand generates such momentum that he needs no bass or drums. He strikes his notes a fraction behind the beat in his right hand, and he emphasizes unexpected notes within each phrase. These ingeniously chosen accents set up an irresistible rhythm – a rock-pause, rock-pause, rock-pause rhythm that continually threatens to capsize the ship but never does. He breaks up these single-note phrases with strong chords and with high-strung Tatum arpeggios. McKenna swings ecstatically hard.

On September 12, 1977, he reviews four recordings: “The Complete Lionel Hampton”; “The Red Norvo Trio with Tal Farlow and Charles Mingus”; “The Complete Fletcher Henderson, 1927-1936”; “Don Byas: Savoy Jam Party.” He says of the “Norvo” album, “The trio had a hot delicacy and it seemed to spin its music out of the air around it.” He calls Byas’s style “voluptuous.”

On June 21, 1978, he attends a jazz concert at the White House: “Rollins played a brilliant, compressed solo, full of vertical melodies, repetitions, and quotations, and Roach matched him with staccato snare-drum figures – super-double-time figures, executed at teeth-gritting speed.” 

June 24, 1978, he’s at Carnegie Hall to hear Ella Fitzgerald. He’s not crazy about her performance: “She inserts falsetto notes, needlessly big intervals, and ski jump glisses.” But he loves the work of her accompanists, Tommy Flanagan (piano), Keter Betts (bass), and Jimmy Smith (drums), who were given fifty minutes to themselves. He says of Flanagan:

He has humor, a zephyr touch, an oblique and original harmonic sense, and unwearying invention. His great facility makes what he does sound too easy – the tricky, quiet, single note melodic lines that often abruptly slow to a walk just before they end; the loose, echoing tenths in his left hand; the nimble parallel chords; the love of melody; and the multilayered improvisations he builds on a tune like “Body and Soul,” which he played tonight.

November 27, 1978, he reviews four Flanagan recordings: “Eclypso,” “Tommy Flanagan 3,” “The Tommy Flanagan Tokyo Recital,” and “Something Borrowed, Something Blue.” Of “Flanagan 3,” he says it’s worthwhile, “especially for a loose, stretching performance of ‘Easy Living,’ which Flanagan likes to play. When he settles into tempo, he gets off a rising-falling upper-register run that holds the light like a blue sky.”

January 22, 1979, he’s at Hopper’s to hear valve-trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and guitarist Jim Hall:

Hall is spare, elusive, soft, and reluctant to part with his beauties, while Brookmeyer always plays as if he were attending a convention. At Hopper’s, the two musicians seemed to be playing in adjacent rooms with the door open. Their ensembles did not blend into a double-edged voice but remained a trombone and a guitar playing simultaneously. Brookmeyer’s volume forced Hall to play louder than usual, and he almost never backed Hall’s solos (organ chords, melody, riffs would all have been proper), which took on a lorn, voyaging air. And Brookmeyer’s and Hall’s rhythmic centers were different. Brookmeyer plays in a pummelling, sometimes staccato on-the-beat style, and Hall often favors legato, downstream pahrasing. Oil and water, the two men filled the room with powerful improvisations, and we heard rich, turning versions of “Begin the Beguine,” and Andy LaVerne original called “Exactly Alike,” “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” “Embraceable You,” John Lewis’s “Skating in Central Park,” and a medium-tempo blues, in which Hall got off a solo full of surprised notes.

February 5, 1979, he’s at Crawdaddy to hear trumpeter Doc Cheatham:

He has a gentle tone and a discreet vibrato. His solos are a succession of lines, steps, curves, parabolas, angles, and elevations. They move with the logic and precision of composition, yet they have the spark and spontaneity of improvisation. Cheatham’s rhythmic underpinnings have a bony clarity and emphasis: all his notes seem to stand out.

February 19, 1979, he writes a tribute to clarinettist Pee Wee Russell:

Russell’s blues were an examination of the proposition that there must be a way to make sadness bearable and beautiful. He would start a solo with half a dozen low, breathy, staccato notes jammed together, repeat them and pause, rise almost an octave to a flickering, half-sounded note, and, before this ascension had registered on the ear, drop back to more staccato breathiness and into a dodging, undulating stretch of notes that had a Giacometti sound. He would for the first time bow in the direction of the beat by constructing a four- or six-bar on the beat melody, and then sneak back down to the cellar for some asides, subtones, and almost palpable breaths. The first chorus done, he would grow less and less knotted. He would move slowly up the scale, growing louder, until in the last chorus he would reach C above middle C with a banners-unfurled declarativeness.

June 19, 1979, he reviews four Charles Mingus recordings. Here’s his description of the Mingus band playing “Folk Forms, No. 1” on the album “Mingus Presents Mingus”:

It begins with Mingus playing a simple blueslike figure. He is joined by Richmond, in ad-lib time. Dolphy enters (on alto saxophone), and is almost immediately followed by Curson, who is muted. The horns converse, the rhythm slips into four-four time and is interrupted by breaks and out-of-tempo passages. Dolphy and Richmond drop out, and Mingus backs Curson. Richmond and Dolphy return, and all four men swim around and around and come to a stop. Mingus solos without backing, and Richmond reappears, pulling the horns after him. There is another stop, and Dolphy solos against broken rhythms, and the four take up their ruminations again. After a third stop, Richmond solos and he and Mingus go into a kicking, jumping, unbelievably swinging duet. Mingus falls silent, allowing Richmond to finish his solo, and there is a stop. Mingus solos briefly, and all converse intently until the rhythm slows, Dolphy moans, and they go out.

October 29, 1979, he reviews two books: Dizzy Gillespie’s memoir, To Be or Not To Bop; and a collection of William P. Gottlieb’s jazz photos called The Golden Age of Jazz. Balliett says of Gottlieb,

Taking pictures of jazz musicians has never been easy. They work largely in semi-darkness, and their grace is measured in seconds. But Gottlieb was not taking pictures; he was photographing a music. Again and again, he catches the precise moment when the musician’s face is suffused with effort and emotion and beauty: the music is there.

The same can be said for Balliett’s Night Creature: again and again, he catches a musician swinging ecstatically hard, conjuring gleaming new improvisations: the music is there.

The book brims with inspired jazz lines. For example:

On Don Byas: “He put bones in Chu Berry’s attack.”

On Fats Navarro: “A Navarro solo was like an immaculate fairway flanked by ankle-deep rough.” 

On Stan Getz: "Getz is the last of the romantic saxophonists, and when he plays ballads one just wishes that he wouldn’t keep peering out longingly between the notes."

On Hank Jones: “His touch is pearled, and his improvisations are spun out of willowy single-note melodic lines.” 

On Tommy Flanagan’s “interval-filled descending figures that suggest someone going downstairs three steps at a time.”

On Bob Brookmeyer: “He affects a smoky tone, Dicky Wells smears and shouts, a placid vibrato, and brief falsetto leaps.”

On Doc Cheatham: “When he executed a diminuendo-crescendo growl with his plunger mute in “Summertime,” the sound exploded.” 

On singer Dardanelle: “She likes to crimp some of her phrase endings and move up or down a tone midway through a long note."

On Keith Jarrett: “The playing is bravura and self-indulgent, like a dandy constantly changing clothes. It shouts and daydreams. It is an improvised music that feeds on itself.” 

On Johnny Hodges: “He bottled Bechet’s urgency and served it in cool, choice doses. He skirted Bechet’s funky tendencies – his growls and squeaks and odd, bubbling sounds. But he kept Bechet’s pouring country tone, his impeccable sense of time, and his rhapsodic approach to slow materials.”

On Betty Carter: “She likes to tip up a note suddenly and let it fall an octave and a half, then slide halfway up to where she began and break off.” 

On Barry Harris: “Everyone of his notes had the same value, whether it stood by it self, went by in an arpeggio, was the keystone of a phrase, or ended a song. Harris was like the perfectly laid fire that refused to catch.”

On Billie Holiday: “She carefully unfolds the lyrics and holds them up for us to see.”

On Jack Wilkins: “He is a wild melodist. He will throw a handful of notes into the high register, make them ring, fill the space after them with silence, and dive into his lowest register, touching each octave as he falls past. Then he will ascend and strike more urgent bells, and go into driving Django Reinhardt chords, which give way to more silence and curling meditative middle-register single notes.”

On Dave McKenna: “Each McKenna improvisation has a hand-printed quality.” 

On Louis Armstrong: “He swung even when he breathed.” 

On Michael Moore: “Each solo gleams and multiplies, like sunlight on water.”

On Coleman Hawkins’ 1939 recording of “Body and Soul”: “Before Hawkins, it was simply a torch song left over from 1930. But Hawkins filled it with his special urgency and eloquence. He blew the song tight, and one can no longer hear it without also hearing Hawkins’s version in the background.”

How I love that “He blew the song tight.”

Night Creature, along with several other Balliett jazz journals, is included in his massive 858-page Collected Works (2000). But I prefer Night Creature; it’s a perfect distillation of Balliett’s brilliant, evocative criticism. And I like the title, which, as Balliett noted at the beginning of the book, is borrowed from a Duke Ellington composition. Balliett wrote, “I do not know what beautiful night creature Ellington had in mind, but mine is jazz itself.” 

May 16, 2022 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl makes beautiful sentences. No painter inspires him more than Henri Matisse. In his “Going Flat Out,” in this week’s issue, a review of MoMA’s “Matisse: The Red Studio,” he says of Matisse’s “Bathers” (1907),

Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh.

That “as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery” is superb!

“Going Flat Out” is Schjeldahl’s fifth New Yorker piece on Matisse. The others are “Twin Peaks” (March 3, 2003), “Art as Life” (August 29, 2005), “The Road to Nice” (July 26, 2010), and “Shapes of Things” (October 20, 2014).  Matisse is one of his touchstones. In “The Road to Nice,” he calls Matisse’s “The Piano Lesson” “my favorite work of twentieth-century art.” Here’s his description of it:

The brushy, big canvas (eight feet high by nearly seven wide) represents Matisse’s son Pierre at an oddly pink-topped piano, his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow, in a schematized room: cornerless gray wall; the pale-blue frame of a French window opening onto triangular swatches of green and gray; a salmon rectangle of curtain; and a black window grille that echoes the curlicues in a music rack bearing the instrument’s brand name, Pleyel, spelled out in reverse. There is a lighted candle (indicating that the time of day is dusk), a metronome (indicating time itself), and two earlier Matisses: a small sculpture of a sensual odalisque and a large image from a painting of a stern-seeming woman seated on a high stool, floating free on the gray wall. The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch. Like any successful art, “The Piano Lesson” generates tensions of antithetical qualities—lyrical and harsh, mysterious and blatant, intimate and grand—and resolves them. It’s terrific, but the past century affords many paintings (and not all of them by Matisse and Picasso) that are as good or better. My preference for it is not a considered judgment. It’s a reflex, like the one that twitches when I’m asked my favorite movie, and I automatically, helplessly, say “Psycho.” 

How I love that “his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow”! The reference to “Psycho” makes me smile every time I read it. 

Gazelle Mba's "On Roy DeCarava"

Roy DeCarava, Hallway (1953)

Gazelle Mba’s “On Roy DeCarava" (London Review of Books, April 7, 2022) contains two wonderful descriptions of DeCarava’s work. She says of his Hallway (1953),

In the recent DeCarava retrospective at the David Zwirner gallery, Hallway stood out among the rows of silver gelatin prints. At first glance, it appears as a dense mass of what the curator Zoé Whitley called his ‘infinite palette of grey tonalities’, which take on volume in their shadowiness. It takes a second for your eyes to adjust, and to see the light in the background of the photo. A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light. The two narrow walls converge into a vanishing point with no discernible horizon. The experience of seeing Hallway up close mimics what I imagine it was like to be there, unmoored, when everyone else had gone to bed. DeCarava seems to say that there is something about this light, this hallway, that won’t let him be, and he tries to draw out its meaning. He was fascinated by walls as an urban motif, walls so thin you can hear the neighbours yelling at their kids, walls that make you feel at home, crumbling walls with broken windows.

That “A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light” is marvellously fine. Mba also provides an excellent description of DeCarava’s Graduation (1949):

Graduation (1949) shows a girl in white dress and white gloves, flowers pinned to her chest, jewellery about her neck and on her ears, her hair curled and styled to perfection. She is pristine. You sense the care and effort put into her appearance, the hours it took to get her looking this way. Sitting between some auntie’s legs while her hair was combed and pulled until it conformed to the desired style, the fabric for her dress and gloves sourced from the right place or bought new. Maybe the jewellery is an heirloom, reserved for moments like this. You would expect to find her at a ball, awash in bright light, surrounded by other tulled women, the air smelling like shea butter, hairspray and perfume mixed with peach schnapps for the grown-ups.

Instead she is alone in a vacant lot. Behind her is the skeleton of a demolished building, graffiti on the wall to her right, broken objects everywhere. There’s a pile of trash in the foreground, with a crumpled newspaper carrying a headline about South Korea. With the rest of the image in shadow, the girl stands in a square of light, walking forwards, calmly and deliberately, as if moving out of the weight and rubble of history into her own future. DeCarava happened on her by accident, but she knows where she’s going. The photograph seems to capture it all: wars, the state’s abandonment of Black urban centres, a young girl on her way to her graduation. But it doesn’t seek to synthesise these facts: no single one overwhelms or denies the existence of the others. Light and dark, mixed into DeCarava’s grey palette.

Those last two lines are inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a splendid appreciation of DeCarava’s subtle art. 

Postscript: See also Hilton Als’ terrific “Roy DeCarava’s Poetics of Blackness” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019). 

Jackson Lears' Moral Bankruptcy

Photo by James Nachtwey, from his "A Harrowed Land"

One of the most fascinating discussions of the war in Ukraine, so far, is the London Review of Books’ “Day 5, Day 9, Day 16: Responses to the Invasion of Ukraine” (March 24, 2022). What a multiplicity of perspectives! Twenty-eight writers voice their responses. The most absorbing ones, for me, are written by writers experiencing the war first-hand inside Ukraine. For example, Olena Stiazhkina:

These Russians are not people. Now that they’ve had a kick in the teeth from our army, they’re killing civilians with indiscriminate rocket strikes. Children’s hospitals and high-rise buildings, buses and ambulances. During the night, Iskander rocket systems fired on the city of Zhytomyr. They destroyed the Mariia Prymachenko Museum and burned her pictures.

This morning, in Berdiansk, one of these monsters from Moscow shot an old man for refusing to hand over his mobile phone. 

Children are being born in bomb shelters, in the basements of hospitals and in the metro. 

These monsters from Moscow – yes, exactly. That’s my response, too. But there’s at least one writer who doesn’t see it that way. Jackson Lears, in “Day 5, Day 9, Day 16,” says, 

Few journalists are able to report from the east of the country, where most of the fighting is, and there is no acknowledgment of the extensive role of far-right extremists in Ukrainian politics and the military. The irony is that for years American liberals have been obsessed with anything that can be loosely labelled as fascism. Only Ukraine is absolved from scrutiny, perhaps because in current American mythology the world’s leading neofascist is Vladimir Putin. Thanks to this madman, Robert Reich announced, ‘the world is currently and frighteningly locked in a battle to the death between democracy and authoritarianism.’ Rather than face up to the major global realignment that is underway, with the convergence of Russia, China and India, Americans remain attached to visions of Armageddon – the death wish at the heart of imperial hubris. 

What about Putin’s vision of Armageddon? Lears doesn’t say anything about that. He doesn’t mention Mariupol, Bucha, Kharkiv or Irpa. As far as he’s concerned, the US shouldn’t have intervened: let Putin have his vicious way. He says as much in his most recent piece, “The Forgotten Crime of War Itself” (The New York Review of Books, April 21, 2022): “US policy prolongs the war and creates the likelihood of a protracted insurgency after a Russian victory, which seems probable at this writing.” 

As an offset against Lears’ moral bankruptcy, I quote the war photographer James Nachtwey, whose graphic pictures of the cost of the Russian onslaught in Ukraine appear in the May 9 New Yorker: 

The barbarity and the senselessness of the Russian onslaught are hard to believe even as I witness them with my own eyes. Bombing and shelling civilian residences, firing tank rounds point-blank into homes and hospitals, murdering noncombatants in militarily occupied areas are all tactics being employed by the Russians in a war that was inflicted on a nonthreatening, neighboring sovereign state. . . . ‘Ordinary’ people are displaying extraordinary courage and determination, if not downright stubbornness, in the face of tremendous destruction and loss of life. [“A Harrowed Land,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2022] 

May 9, 2022 Issue

Each day I check nytimes.com for the latest news on the war in Ukraine. I’m addicted to it. The Times does a great job reporting it. But I hunger for more than just reportage. I crave accounts of personal experience. That’s exactly what Luke Mogelson’s “The Wound-Dressers,” in this week’s issue, provides. I devoured it. Mogelson is a paramedic and a war correspondent. He’s written several brilliant pieces for The New Yorker, including “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017) and “Dark Victory” (November 6, 2017). In “The Wound-Dressers,” he embeds with the Hospitallers, a battalion of volunteer medics in Ukraine. The piece consists of thirteen segments:

1. Begins in Kyiv, at St. Michael’s Monastery, then flashes back to Paris, where Mogelson’s Ukraine journey starts (“Two days later, in Paris, at 7:30 a.m., I arrived outside a Métro station near the Place d’Italie, where people were loading boxes of food and other provisions into the luggage compartment of a commercial bus”). He travels with his friend, Anastasia Fomitchova, who, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is returning home to Kyiv to participate in the war. On the bus, they meet Petro, a thirty-three-year-old construction worker, who had lived in France for eight years, and who is now bound for his home town, Ivano-Frankivsk, to report for duty. Mogelson writes,

As we traversed Luxembourg and Germany, the driver stopped at a gas station every four or five hours, to let us use the rest room and buy food; Petro neither ate nor slept, and his anxiety seemed to increase as we neared Ukraine. He had never fired a weapon. “I don’t know where they’re going to send me,” he told us midway through Poland, his hands trembling. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” Embarrassed by the tears welling in his eyes, he explained, “Not everyone is ready for this.”

2. They arrive in Kyiv and go to Anastasia’s apartment on Andriyivsky Descent, “a steep cobblestone road, lined with cafés, bars, and art galleries, near the Dnieper River.” Anastasia is a medic. In 2017, she trained with the Hospitallers in southern Ukraine. Now, she plans to re-join them. But first, she visits her parents in Kyiv and unsuccessfully tries to persuade them to go abroad. Then she visits St. Michael’s Monastery. This is where the piece began. Mogelson writes:

Uniformed men with Kalashnikovs patrolled the perimeter and guarded the gate. Anastasia approached a fence, through which we could see the cathedral. She bowed her head; when she lifted it, she was crying. I asked her what she had prayed for. “My country, my city, and my family,” she replied.

3. The next day, Anastasia learns that the Hospitallers are mustering at St. Michael’s. She and Mogelson go there:

Inside the monastery, everything was in a state of frenetic metamorphosis. Men and women in combat fatigues hurried in all directions; priests in black robes unloaded boxes from trucks and vans; in a lecture hall where seminary students normally underwent theological instruction, a soldier provided basic firearms training to volunteers who had just received Kalashnikovs. Shouted commands rang through hallways adorned with oil paintings of church patriarchs from centuries past.

They meet Yana Zinkevych, the leader of the Hospitallers. Mogelson describes the scene inside St. Michael’s:

Bandages, gauze, saline, syringes, litters, splints, and other medical equipment were piled on a set of stairs. Donated food—sacks of potatoes, jars of pickled vegetables, preserved meat, canned goods—crowded the corridors. The refectory had been converted into sleeping quarters, and dozens of mattresses covered the dining tables. In the kitchen, medics waited in line for bowls of borscht and kasha. I would get to know many of them: an economics professor, a dentist, a cellist, a cryptocurrency trader, a knife-fighting coach, a ballet dancer, numerous students, a filmmaker, a farmer, a therapist, several journalists. Fearing Russian reprisals, they all used code names.

Mogelson accompanies a Hospitaller medic, code-named August, on a mission to Irpin. He describes what he sees:

To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.

4. In the first week of March, he goes with two medics to the edge of a neighbourhood called Horenka, where Hospitaller is scouting out a location for a new stabilization point:

Horenka, which bordered Bucha to the east, was the scene of fierce Russian shelling—on our way, as we passed Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles, a mortar exploded on the road ahead of us, rocking the ambulance and obliging us to turn back for a while. It was dark when we finally reached our destination, and bright trails streaked across the night sky. Rockets launched by the Ukrainians flashed in the woods.

5. On March 16, he goes to Kharkiv:

Shelling had laid waste to several square blocks downtown. Offices, shops, restaurants, cafés, university buildings, and an iconic pub named after Ernest Hemingway were in ruins, some encased in ice from broken pipes. An enormous crater yawned outside the regional administrative headquarters, a six-story monolith that had partially withstood the blast. A second missile had destroyed a kitchen in the basement, killing several women. The top of a skull lay nearby. Firefighters with shovels were still digging through the rubble, searching for bodies. A Territorial Defense soldier, code-named I.T., said that twenty-four corpses had already been retrieved. I.T., who had been inside the building during the strike, told me, “I should be dead.” He’d worked as a computer engineer in Kharkiv before the war, and he shared Anastasia’s astonishment at the sudden onset of havoc. “Two weeks ago, I was arguing with my wife, telling her I was bored with my life,” he recalled, with rueful irony. Looking around at the collapsed buildings, the charred husks of vehicles, and the mountains of wreckage, he seemed unable to process it all. “I feel like I’m in a video game,” he said.

The following morning, he’s eating breakfast in the lobby of his hotel when a huge explosion shakes the building:

Its glass façade warped in and out as we all jumped from our chairs. The target had been a government academy for civil-service employees. It wasn’t far, and we arrived there at the same time as a team of rescuers. A whole section of the institution had been reduced to smashed slabs of concrete, bent I-beams, and twisted rebar. A dead man lay next to the building. Another man, caked with dust, was climbing out of a ground-floor window.

6. On March 20, he accompanies Anastasia to a stabilization point in an abandoned maternity hospital in Horenka:

Outside the maternity hospital, there was a statue of a stork, a bundled baby dangling from its beak. An artillery shell had lodged in the pavement; shrapnel had pocked the hospital’s walls and shattered its windows. The ranking Hospitaller was a fifty-two-year-old neurosurgeon code-named Yuzik. A grenade in the Donbas had given him a limp. He walked with a cane and wore a lanyard from which dangled a wooden crucifix and a miniature handgun. Yuzik showed us an examination room that he’d converted into an emergency first-aid station. In a lobby lined with photographs of infants, heart-shaped balloons were still filled with helium; on February 26th, when the Russians first shelled Horenka, six women had given birth in the basement.

7. One night at the maternity hospital, Yuzik, the neurosurgeon, shows Mogelson his “Right Sector” tattoo. This leads to a discussion of Ukrainian far-right groups such as the Azov Battalion and Right Sector. Mogelson writes, “There was no question that leaders of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector championed a chauvinistic, illiberal ethos. Some had openly espoused anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism.” But he concludes, 

Over all, however, such views were more marginal in Ukraine than in Russia—or, for that matter, in the U.S. Yarosh ran for President, in 2014, but received less than one per cent of the vote. In 2019, Right Sector and veterans of the Azov Battalion allied with other far-right groups to field parliamentary candidates and failed to win a single seat. That year, Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Jew whose great-grandparents had died in the Holocaust, was elected President in a landslide.

Valery Zukin, director of the maternity hospital, is also Jewish. When Mogelson mentions depictions of anti-Russian fighters as neo-Nazis to him, he replies, “It’s very big bullshit.” 

8. In early April, Mogelson visits Trostyanets, a city in northeast Ukraine, from which the Russians had recently retreated after occupying it for a month. He encounters a middle-aged man, named Oleksandr, walking his bicycle through the mud. Oleksandr mentions to Mogelson that toward the end of the occupation, Russian soldiers had taken refuge in abasement under the train station. They decide to have a look together:

I turned on my phone’s light and followed Oleksandr down a flight of stairs, into a dank network of rooms cluttered with Russian uniforms, boots, and ration packs. Socks were draped over pipes, playing cards lay on tables, and a shocking number of empty vodka, wine, and whiskey bottles were scattered everywhere. I was taken aback by the evidence of heavy communal drinking—this was the fourth war I had covered and the first time I’d ever seen that—but many residents later told me that one of the first things the Russians did in Trostyanets was plunder its supermarkets for booze.

 9. A few days later, Mogelson visits Bucha, another village that the Russians occupied for a month before retreating. He describes what he sees on Ivana-Frank Street:

During the month-long Russian occupation, the street, which was close to various Ukrainian-held neighborhoods, had become a front line, and now burnt-out Russian tanks and trucks listed among the remains of splintered houses and overturned or pancaked vehicles. The few people who were around wandered amid the debris with dazed expressions, resembling the survivors of a natural catastrophe.

At the end of Ivana-Franka Street, an elderly woman in a down coat and a shawl beckons to him. He follows her:

I followed her up a steep berm to a set of railroad tracks. They ran parallel to an open culvert where, at the bottom, two male bodies were tangled together, half buried under weeds and trash that had collected during recent rains. The woman said that the victims were brothers, adding, “Everybody loved them. We don’t know why they were killed.”

The brothers, Yuri and Victor, had been in their sixties and had lived in adjacent houses. Locals had referred to them as Uncle Yuri and Uncle Victor. While Bucha was occupied, Yuri had worn a white cloth around his sleeve, to signal neutrality, and baked bread for hungry neighbors. Both men had been shot in the head. Empty beer bottles lay in the grass.

Mogelson sees more victims:

A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. “He was shot in the back of the head,” he said.

Outside a small two-story home, Russian soldiers had constructed a makeshift checkpoint from pallets, cinder blocks, and empty ammunition boxes. In the back yard, three more men had been executed. One, shot through the ear, lay on his back against a fence. Another, beside a woodpile, wore a sheepskin-and-leather jacket that was speckled with unmelted snow. He, too, was on his back; a T-shirt covered his face. The third man was prone. Half of his head had been blown off, and his brain had spilled into the dirt.

10. Still in Bucha, Mogelson sees more atrocities:

Down the road from Havryliuk’s place, charred corpses lay beside a garbage pile. Locals said that Russians in a tank had dumped them and lit them on fire. (Later, police would tape off the scene and place yellow markers identifying six victims.) One appeared to be a woman, another a child—though they were so severely mutilated that it was hard to say for sure. Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the burned and severed legs and torsos.

He reports, “According to the chief regional prosecutor, more than six hundred bodies were found in the district.”

He views a mass grave behind a church: 

Bulky black bags were still heaped in the third pit, and limbs protruded from the mud. The priest, Father Andrii Halavin, was in the nave, repairing windows shattered by projectiles. “It’s not just here,” he told me. “People are buried all over Bucha.”

The priest wants to show him a park:

On the way, we passed a street where Ukrainian drones had wiped out a convoy from the first Russian unit to enter the neighborhood. The turrets, engines, cannons, and tracks of dismembered tanks were strewn across a four-hundred-yard stretch of road. The destruction was extraordinary. Several residents told me that the conduct of later waves of Russian soldiers had been much worse, perhaps out of vengeance for the first.

Curiously, the park is littered with horse manure:

Father Halavin explained that a stable had been bombed. The horses that survived had run wild through the suburb, crazed by the incessant shelling. When I asked where they were now, Halavin shrugged.

Mogelson sees two more bodies:

On a small street across the tracks from Ivana-Franka, an old woman lay face down in her doorway; a trembling dog stood at her shoulder, barking over and over. When I opened a can of tuna, the dog ravenously devoured it. I went inside and found a second woman, also elderly, lying dead on the kitchen floor. 

Mogelson writes,

A Russian tank had plowed through the yard across the street. A sniper had occupied the attic of a house next door. Amid such brute lethality, what chance did the sisters have?

11. On April 6, Mogelson is in Bucha, attending a ceremony at the mass grave conducted by Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine: “Walking the length of the trench, Epiphanius sprinkled holy water, from a silver basin, over the heaped-up corpses.”

12. The day before the ceremony, Mogelson is in Bucha observing a team of volunteers collect bodies and load them in a van for transport first to the morgue and then to the church. He reports that one of the volunteers, Sergey Matiuk, “estimated that he and his colleagues had picked up about three hundred corpses, at least a hundred of which had had their hands tied behind their backs. ‘A lot of them were tortured,’ he said.”

13. April 7, Mogelson and Anastasia are back in Kyiv. They walk down Andriyivsky Descent. She tells him that the Hospitallers are being sent east. He asks if she’s going with them. She says, “I have to think about it. There is a high chance of being killed.” She returns to Paris. The piece ends, “After going to Paris, Anastasia went back to Ukraine. When we last spoke, she was visiting her family in Kyiv. The Hospitallers were moving out of St. Michael’s. She planned to join them in the east.”

What a great piece! My summary fails to do it justice. It’s one thing to read the news reports about Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv. It’s quite another to read Mogelson’s first-person account of his visits to these places. He puts us there, on the ground. “The Wound-Dressers” is the best piece on the war in Ukraine that I’ve read so far. 

April 25 & May 2, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rebecca Mead’s absorbing “Norwegian Wood,” an account of her trip to Brumunddal, Norway, to see eighteen-story Mjøstårnet, the world’s tallest all-timber tower. Mead puts us squarely there, inside Mjøstårnet:

The material from which the tower had been built was evident, though, in the airy ground-floor lobby and restaurant, where wooden dining tables and chairs were arrayed on bare wooden floorboards, wooden pendant lampshades dangled on long cords, and large bamboo palms in pots were clustered at the base of a curved wooden staircase that rose to a mezzanine. Large columns supporting the building, as well as angled braces cutting across the restaurant’s walls of windows, were formed from massive glulam blocks, the thickest of which were almost five feet by two feet, like pieces from a monstrous Jenga set. Riding a glass-walled elevator to my room, on the eleventh floor, I noticed that the elevator shaft was built from similar chunky blocks.

Those glulam blocks are what give Mjøstårnet its strength and stability. “Glulam” is short for “glued laminated timber.” Mead writes, 

Glulam is manufactured at industrial scale from the spruce and pine forests that cover about a third of Norway’s landmass, including the slopes around Brumunddal, from which the timber for Mjøstårnet was harvested.

She also visits several other innovative all-wood structures, including a seven-story timber office building in Oslo. She says of it,

The tower’s base was occupied by a cafeteria. In its concrete floor, blond-wood furnishings, and floor-to-ceiling windows partly obscured by massive trusses made with blocks of glulam, I could see a wooden-architecture vernacular emerging: airy spaces formed by pale wood beams and columns that had visibly been slotted and joined together. The wooden surfaces had been treated only minimally, to prevent the kind of yellowing that Norwegians associate with old-timey country cabins—the “Norwegian wood” of the Beatles song. Instead, the palette was a globally fashionable greige and cream.

My favourite passage in Mead’s piece is her description of her Mjøstårnet hotel room:

I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa. I had no desire to go elsewhere….

“Norwegian Wood” is double bliss: great subject; wonderful writing. I enjoyed it immensely.

3 for the Sea: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action.

By “action” I mean the events represented in the narrative. What interests me is the way these events are conveyed, how they’re written. Here, for example, is McPhee’s description of a pirate attack:

Fast-crackling rifle shots. Bullets slamming the mangroves. A pirogue full of pirates fleeing for the swamps, pursued by more bullets. 

Very powerful boats appear. One of them circles the ship. Two lingering pirates cling to the bills of the anchor not in use. They stand on the flukes. They plunge into the river. Swiftly receding in the brown current, their heads bob. Their heads become dots in the water as they are swept away.

The pirates’ forty-horse pirogue, with stores seized from the upper forepeak, reaches a sandspit at the edge of the manglar. There are six aboard. They take off running.

That’s just a taste. To get the full kinetic effect, read the six-page description in full. Note the active verbs (“circles,” “clings,” “stand,” “plunge,” “bob”), the present tense, and the brilliant sentence fragments (“Fast-crackling rifle shots. Bullets slamming the mangroves. A pirogue full of pirates fleeing for the swamps, pursued by more bullets”) – three techniques that McPhee uses to convey immediacy. 

Not all the events in Looking for a Ship are that dramatic. Some are just routine shipboard activities. For example:

Chipping rust is a job for people made of neurological nylon. They use hand-held jackhammers – needle guns, chisel guns, Bumble Bees, triple-scalers. They dislodge rust and they create sound. Wherever they are, wherever you are, you can hear them. You can climb the flying bridge, wrap a pillow around your ears, stuff yourself in a hawsepipe, hide under a table – you cannot escape the sound. As a result, there are union rules limiting the sound to six hours a day. Depending on where you are, the chippers can seem to be hovering aircraft, they can seem to be splashing water, they can suggest a dentist drilling a cavity hour after hour. There is a rust buster so large, so heavy, so lurchingly difficult to control that Vernon McLaughlin is often the only sailor willing to accept the task. This is the Arnessen Horizontal Deck Scaler, colloquially known as the lawnmower. It looks something like a lawnmower, but if it were ever used on a lawn it would bury itself in seven seconds. After standing watch from four to eight, Mac will run the lawnmower from nine to twelve and again from one to four, while Peewee follows him, sweeping chips.

That final phrase “while Peewee follows him, sweeping chips” is wonderfully placed. McPhee’s eye for dynamic detail enlivens everything he writes, even description of such seemingly mundane tasks as chipping rust.   

Raban’s Passage to Juneau brims with action, much of it generated by wind and water:

The sea in Saratoga Passage frosted over, as the forecast wind began to fill in from the south. The wrinkled skin of the water became ridged with breaking wavelets; in less than half an hour, the waves were steep, regular, well-formed, hard-driven by the building wind. With the headsail out to starboard, the boat skidded through the sea – the winched sheet bar-taut, the sail molded into a white parabola as rigid as one of Frank Gehry’s curved concrete walls. The wind keened in the steel rigging. At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam. Hauling on the wheel, driving the boat downwind as it tried to slew broadside-on, I was on a jittery high. I hadn’t had such sailing in many months. The three-step waltzing motion of the boat, the throbbing, strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.

To steer a straight course was impossible. Overpressed, and unbalanced by its single sail, the boat corkscrewed downwind at 7.6 knots, held to that speed by the braking force of its own bow wave, which peeled away from the hull in a long, curling mustache of surf. The mizzenmast behind me shuddered with the strain taken by the rigging, and I was frightened that something up there was about to break. If one thing broke, so would a whole lot of things, in extremely rapid and disconcerting succession. It was a relief to gain the shelter of Strawberry Head on the Whidbey Island side, where the wind was reduced to muffled gusts and skirls, and I took in a half-dozen rolls of sail and let the boat saunter, gently, through a seascape so changed that it belonged to another nation.

A log the length of the boat was twirling slowly around on the starboard bow. I hauled the wheel to port and passed backward under the bridge – a pity, since there were half a dozen pale faces up there, and I was sorry to find myself suddenly turned into a happy spectacle of nautical incompetence. I got the boat facing the right way, yawed on a boil, slewed on an eddy, and slammed into a line of low, breaking overfalls. Somewhere, as I came out of the pass like a cork expelled from the neck of a champagne bottle, I found room in my head for the thought that I would not at all like to be doing this in a motorless cedar canoe. 

How I love that “as I came out of the pass like a cork expelled from the neck of a champagne bottle.” And that “At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam” is inspired!

What is the central action of O’Hanlon’s Trawler? Six words sum it up: pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge, and yaw. So violent is the Norlantean’s motion that O’Hanlon struggles to keep his balance. Here’s what happens in his cabin:

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my wooly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still … The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Other smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side – and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew-up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

And here’s what happens in the fish-room:

Intending to clamber over the 3-foot sides of the conveyor, I began to try to hitch up the civilian trousers beneath my oil-skin trousers (there seemed to be so many belts and braces and rubber straps; and the whole outfit was so uncomfortable; and it was so difficult to keep everything up around a moving flop of stomach when the world would not stay still; and besides, my boxer shorts long ago half-shredded by jungle mould, had now decided to give up altogether and to drop, dying, around my knees). And then, for the second time – and once again, so gently, without warning, so slowly – I was weightless, I was airborne. The conveyor belt passed beneath me; someone shot me in the left shin; the travelling wave of froth and foam came curling up to wash over me and to leave me, splayed out full length, against the rusty plates of the port side of the inner hull.

When the world would not stay still – that is the Norlantean’s world. O’Hanlon evokes it brilliantly. 

Vivid action is one factor that makes these three books great. Another is their terrific sense of place. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.