By Gabe Habash | Dec 07, 2012 - PW
This week: a British variation on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a moving book on our own extinction, and a book all Cloud Atlas lovers need to read.
On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger (Counterpoint) –Award-winning poet Challenger travels from a writer’s solitary cabin on the Ding Dong Moor, close by the ruins of a tin mine in Cornwall, England, to a journey to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, back to the North Yorkshire town of Whitby, and on to the tundra of the Arctic where the language and culture of the Inuit barely survive. At every stop in her “peregrination,” she muses on evolutionary changes marked by extinctions past and present. The chief culprit of our “estrangement from nature” in the 20th century is, for her, “the urge to fuse humans and technology.” Throughout this beautifully written, moving, and important book, Challenger yearns to find that feeling of belonging to a particular place. Check out our Q&A with Challenger.
Life! Death! Prizes! By Stephen May (Bloomsbury) - In this British variation on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 18-year-old Billy Smith is forced to care for his six-year-old half-brother, Oscar, after their single mother is killed during a botched mugging. It’s his university gap year, and while working part-time, Billy must meet Oscar’s needs and still find time to drink, smoke weed, and play computer games. He must also fight to retain custody of Oscar, despite the objections of his well-meaning aunt, bureaucratic drones, and Oscar’s absent father, who is suddenly back on the scene. Billy’s arch—and sometimes oversophisticated—observations are probably the most enjoyable aspect of the book.
