Jack Coolbaugh
Rettig presents a highly engrossing memoir of his time in his early twenties venturing to the north bank of Alaska (you know, the part in the Artic Circle) to work for a tugboat and barge company that supported oil drilling in the region. His adventure of self discovery and personal challenges is told through a series of evocative vignettes. The short vignettes evoke the never-setting Sun, the monotony of the work, the refractions of ice and snow on the frigid Artic Ocean, the drug-induced mindsets of afterwork hours, and the often delirious state some workers would enter after too long in such conditions. Through his stories we get a sense of the camaraderie as well as the difficulty of long shifts in cold, harsh conditions, the beauty seen everyday as well as the moral dilemmas of the work, the knowledge gained of native cultures as well as the ever present mortal dangers. Rettig examines a transformative period in his life using detailed stories, wonderful photography, and reflections from 30 years later. He using vivid detail to paint pictures of the beauty seen. He is able to take stories from these college summers and the lessons he learned and tie them elegantly to his modern day life and family. How can a lesson on a tug boat apply to raising daughters? How can his own leaving of the nest apply to his son leaving for college 3 decades later? He also (and most significantly) presents a 30yr journey of growth in examining moral/ethical dilemmas of personal roles in destructive endeavors (even if he wasn't directly working for Oil). How do we deal with the choices we make? How can we come to understand the world we live in and how things actually work? How can a person grapple with an exciting job they once had they tangentially supported something that is drastically damaging the planet? Why did he choose to spend summers away from family and his girlfriend in harsh conditions on the edge of the world? (I don't buy that it was for the money - and I don't think Rettig does either). We see Rettig develop and grow in his understanding of the impact that the oil industry is having and he takes an unflinching look at his own role. We see him 30 years later in Tahoe with his family seeing the impacts of climate change and wondering how things could improve (or at least stop getting worse). These quotes below stand out to me as examples of his prose and his goals for the book - what choices do we make, why do we make them, and how do we look back on them?
“Decisions, choices, and divergent paths; we all choose what seas to sail and how to navigate them. Inevitable squalls present challenges in our thoughts and interpretations. How we meet them and negotiate them is often more important than the events themselves.”
“While working up north, I gained some of my most long-lasting memories and life lessons. Development of a strong work ethic, coming to terms with life and death situations, and experiencing the strength of camaraderie, all came into play. But most of all, I'm grateful for all the questions my northern sojourn offered. I still grapple over larger issues - the journey continues.”
Overall, Rettig tells you what he is doing in the title “Refractions” - “the action of distorting an image by viewing through a medium”. Rettig is often taking photos in his stories (and he provides those within the chapters) and these photos are refractions of what he was seeing, his stories are refractions of his memories, and this book is a refraction of a lifetime of growth, challenges, and activism for the environment and tribal rights. You will leave reading this memoir with your own memories of working on the edge of the world with a new family and leave you wanting to learn more about the environment, Big Oil (and their role in our ever growing crises), native cultures, and how you can live an interesting, adventurous life of meaning.
A quick moving parable (allegory?), The Parade is worth reading just for the final scene. While I complain that Eggers wrote too quick of a story not allowing for enough meditation, I would recommend The Parade to anyone interested in international aid and development or anyone with an afternoon to spend reading a B+ novel.
Without names, backstories, or even moderate physical character descriptions, Eggers' characters are projections, shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. Four and Nine (the two workers hired to build a road connecting the rural south with the modern Northern capitol) are intriguing foils yet their minimal dialogue and development reveal that Eggers' purpose to have the reader inhabit the characters and fill in their stories themselves. What you gain from this novel then invariably depends on what you bring. The war-torn country the novel is set in could be adapted easily to match any war-torn country of the past (or future). With this format, Eggers' effectively questions broadly the role of NGOs and international actors in post-war countries and their ability to heal a country or effectively help others. I am interested in the debates surrounding international aid and it's issues and Eggers contributes effectively with this book. I knock off a few stars in this review just for how short this book is. I think it could have been far more effective if it had been slower, more drawn out, and meditative, leaving Four, in particular, more moments to question his actions and motivations. The Parade is a significant event that shape Four and Nine forever and Eggers should have let us inhabit his characters more so that it could effect us too.
Erik Larson is my favorite non-fiction author and while he doesn't turn in his best work here (I still think Devil in the White City is superior), this book is still a good read. Larson excels at writing non-fiction in a fiction style, shaping his narrative off of Vonnegut's “Man in the Hole” story arcs (where the main character “experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success”). Where this book lacks however is in the subject. Churchill has been written about so much that it is challenging to find something new to share and Larson acknowledges this in the Sources and Acknowledgements chapter at the end of the book, saying “One danger in writing about Churchill is that you'll become overwhelmed at the very start [...] by the sheer volume of work already in the public domain.” But what Larson does to counteract this is to focus on a short-window, the first year of his Prime Minister-ship and he gives space for small moments of humanity. Some of my favorite moments were the love stories between minor characters in the midst of terrible bombing raids. Larson says this eloquently saying “I tried also to bring to the foreground characters often given secondary treatment in the big histories. Every Churchill scholar has quoted the diaries of John Colville, but it seemed to me that Colville wanted to be a character in his own right, so I tried to oblige him. I know of no other work that mentions his bittersweet romantic obsession with Gay Margesson [...] [Scholars] dismissed these and other omissions as ‘trivial entries which are of no general interest.' At the time he actually made them, however, the events at hand were anything but trivial. What I found so interesting about his pursuit of Gay was that it unfolded while London was aflame, with bombs falling every day, and somehow the two of them managed to carve out moments of, as he put it, ‘sufficient bliss'”. This is where all of Larson's works excel - in creating space and time to recognize small moments of humanity in the midst of larger-than-life historical events. You can feel like you were there because he slows down time and allows for the real moments of life to spill in (just because a war is on, regular life doesn't come to a complete halt, like so history books seem to imply). I just found that there were ultimately too few of these moments to make this as great as his other works. All in all, Larson's writing still excels and this novel is worth reading not only for the moments of humanity he presents but also the displays of leadership he explains. Churchill really seemed like the right leader at the right time and it made me wonder what our current crisis would be like under different leadership.