| 20 April 2010
Few people have done more to promote the spread of Buddhism in the West than Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk from Vietnam who lives in France and conducts well-attended retreats around the world.
Nhat Hanh has written more than 100 books, most of them revolving around the theme of living mindfully in the moment. Now he has joined with co-author Lilian Cheung, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health, to apply that wisdom to diet and nutrition.
Although Savor does not break new ground, it may prove useful by showing people who struggle with weight gain how the principles of mindfulness can help.
Weight-loss programs, diet books and diet foods are a multi-billion-dollar industry. The authors offer a concise overview of the factors that influence consumption, noting that people are “surrounded by societal forces that drive us to eat more and move less.” The result is weight gain, obesity, and myriad health and emotional problems.
Food companies spend more on advertising than any other industry segment except cars. This bombardment has created a “culture of constant snacking, drinking and eating,” with the result that the percentage of Americans who are overweight or obese is steadily growing.
Savor explains how a core Buddhist teaching known as the Four Noble Truths applies to eating.
The first truth holds that life involves suffering. In this case, being overweight or obese increases the risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and premature death. The second truth is that craving, such as a craving for the pleasure found in food and drink, causes suffering. The third truth is that we can address suffering, in this instance by believing we can change negative habits. And the fourth truth lists steps to end suffering, such as setting realistic goals, finding a supportive network of friends, and eating mindfully.
Savor encourages readers to eat slowly to appreciate the gift of nutritious food. The authors suggest trying it with an apple, enjoying each bite, “immersing yourself in the experience 100 percent.”
“We are propelled,” the book says, “by the fast pace of high-tech living – high-speed Internet, e-mails, instant messages and cell phones – and the expectation that we are always on call, always ready to respond instantly to any message we get.”
Nhat Hanh and Cheung recommend a vegetarian or vegan diet, suggesting that readers reduce, if not eliminate, their consumption of meat, fish, chicken and dairy products, including eggs, milk and cheese. They note the staggering environmental toll of meat production, including the release of methane tied to global warming, the destruction of rain forests to expand grain production for farm animals, and the pollution of water and air from animal waste.
Vegetarians and vegans, the book says, tend to be healthier and weigh less than those who consume animal products high in unhealthy fat.
Much of the text covers familiar ground. The authors recommend that people consume more fruits and vegetables, and cover at least half their plates with fruits or vegetables at each meal.
They stress the importance of regular exercise, calling it “about as close to a magic potion as you can get.” Not surprisingly, they note the negative impact of television, tying it to lack of exercise and obesity. Children spend more time watching TV and playing on computers than they do in school.
Unfortunately, the book includes a disturbing Buddhist parable about a young couple crossing the desert with their 3-year-old son. When they run out of food, they decide to eat their son to survive. The story is figuratively supposed to illustrate the suffering caused by mindless consumption. The authors concede that the story “may sound unimaginable, cruel and totally unacceptable.” Then why include such an offensive tale, which adds nothing to the book and likely will repel many readers?
Other than that, Savor is a helpful guide for anyone who cares about diet and weight, with many tips about using mindfulness to stick to a healthy diet.
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life, by Thich Nhat Hanh and Lilian Cheung; HarperOne; 292 pp.; $25.99.
| 06 April 2010
John Banville's The Infinities.
The modern literary novelist faces two large difficulties. One is how to write something worth reading, a story perhaps, invoking, perhaps, the human condition, without recourse to the worn-out conventions of realistic narrative fiction (a situation brilliantly discussed by James Wood in the March 15 edition of The New Yorker).
The second problem is what might be called the incredible shrinking human being. For some reason, whether because of changing social and cultural trends, or the influence of communications technology, people don’t seem a weighty as they used to. Don’t believe me? Google the portraits of the American presidents, and observe the visible erosion of gravitas between Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon.
Maybe it has to do with the (purported) death of God. Whatever the cause, it’s harder for even the best, most serious writer to maintain interest in a group of characters over the course of an entire book than it was, say, for Dickens or Conrad or Tolstoy.
In The Infinities, John Banville knocks down both these problems like so many ninepins, and he does it with the wit, elegance and conviction that have won him favorable comparisons to that supreme modernist magician, Vladimir Nabokov. In fact, The Infinities is so clever, so filled with invention and verbal delight, it is almost possible to overlook how extremely satisfied it is with itself.
In a rural house grand enough to have a name, “Arden,” a potent patriarch, Adam Godley, lies dying in an upstairs bedroom while his family gathers around to expose, inadvertently, their individual flaws and common dysfunctions. “Old Adam” was a revolutionary theoretical mathematician, the kind of genius who exerts a dolorous influence on all who come close to him.
Dorothy, his first wife, drowned herself, Virginia Woolf-style, with rocks in her pockets. His second, younger wife, Ursula, burdened by the care of the great man and her conviction of his infidelities, has become a secret lush. “Young Adam,” large and handsome, has been rendered ineffectual by his father’s neglect, while his sister, Petra, has been driven to neurotic self-mutilation by an excess of paternal attention.
Various other characters hover about: Adam’s beautiful actress wife Helen, whom everyone expects will leave him soon enough. A fastidious journalist, Roddy Wagstaff, who poses as Petra’s boyfriend in a bid to become Old Adam’s biographer. A couple of servants. A family doctor.
This could all be very tiresome and overly familiar were it not narrated by the Greek god Hermes, who opens the book by holding back the dawn for one hour so his father, Zeus, can seduce the lovely Helen. Hermes’ voice is arch and probing, full of affection for the mere mortals in the house.
"Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy."
In the guise of Hermes, Banville leaps in and out of the minds of each principal character, sketching in the family’s story. By this conceit, he establishes a distance between the characters and the reader that can be filled up with Nabokovian (or I suppose by this date we might say “Banvillian”) stylistic filigree: “When darkness sifts from the air like fine soot…” “the ramparts of the clouds.” What reader could fail to take joy at such language?
Thus a story that might have been lugubrious is turned light and gay, without losing sight of the pathos of humankind – or godkind, for that matter. Here and there Hermes tells us, in his witty asides, how the universe came to be, how it works, how and why the gods created humans, and it all holds together. He tells us of the two human qualities the gods do not understand, love and death. Love, he says, “is the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction.” Death is what all the gods, Zeus included, most desire, the one thing they cannot obtain.
To his credit Banville plays each of its gambits straight. While he hints here and there that the Olympian conceit is the product of the Old Adam’s dying solipsism, Banville creates a consistent cosmology that would not be out of place in a fantasy novel.
And indeed, this is a fantasy novel, set in a parallel universe, where Einstein was wrong, Mary Queen of Scots beheaded the upstart Elizabeth Tudor, young Adam’s car runs on seawater. It’s all a delirious confection.
And yet, even the gods endure real sadness, if not quite mustering the capacity for tragedy. The Infinities is Banville’s first literary novel since he won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for The Sea. If the too-palpable subtext of authorial self-regard prevents this book from being quite as great as it thinks it is, it has the advantage, at 288 pages, of not overstaying its welcome.
Chauncey Mabe, former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel, can be reached at
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The Infinities. John Banville. Knopf. $25.95. 288 pp.
| 29 March 2010
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.
Before the publication of this book, few people other than scientists had ever heard of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who died of cancer in 1951.
Lacks was a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore when doctors, without her knowledge or consent, sliced cancerous tissue from her cervix for research purposes. To the astonishment of scientists, the cancer cells began reproducing so rapidly that within a short time billions of them were available for research in laboratories around the world.
“Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse,” the author writes in her fascinating debut book.
The book garnered rave reviews and jumped onto The New York Times bestseller list shortly after its release. Skloot is a smooth writer, but the book is almost too ambitious in scope. It tries to meld science, race, poverty, family, ethics, medicine, religion and business, but the narrative is sometimes confusing as it jumps back and forth in time, place and theme.
Skloot first learned about the amazing cells -- dubbed HeLa for the first two letters of the donor’s first and last names -- in a college biology class in 1988. Her curiosity led her eventually to embark on a decade-long search to learn more about Lacks and her five children, who for years had no clue that their mother’s cells were being credited with numerous advances in medicine, including development of the polio vaccine.
Excitement about the immortal cells led to wild speculation. One of Henrietta’s sons thought that serum made from the cells might allow people to live for 800 years.
The author’s detailed discussion of cell biology may cause some readers’ eyes to glaze over. The more interesting parts of the book involve Skloot’s tenacious, almost obsessive, search for information about the Lacks family, as well as her discussion of the ethical issues involved in cell research.
Initially, the Lacks children wanted nothing to do with a white author, but Skloot’s dogged persistence gradually won their trust. As they opened up, she pieced together a family history born in slavery and marked by rural poverty, discrimination, crime, mental illness and superstitious beliefs.
As Lacks’ children and grandchildren learned about the importance of their mother’s cells in medicine, they wondered, in the words of daughter Deborah, “how come her family can’t afford to see no doctor.”
One of the most affecting episodes in the book comes when Henrietta’s children finally are invited to Johns Hopkins to view their mother’s cells and watch them divide and grow under a microscope. As a researcher points to a cell splitting in two and explains that both cells will have their mother’s DNA, Deborah stands mesmerized and whispers, “Lord have mercy,” as she covers her mouth with one hand.
Although Johns Hopkins never profited from the sale of HeLa cells, others did. One commercial laboratory charges from $100 to nearly $10,000 per vial of her cells, which grow “like crabgrass” and have been an unquestioned boom for scientific research. More than 60,000 scientific articles have been published about research using HeLa cells.
Scientists have not explained why Lacks’ cancer cells turned out to be the ones that would fulfill their dream of finding a continuously reproducing cell line that would never die.
Readers naturally might wonder about the legality of using excised tissue for scientific purposes without a patient’s consent. Surprisingly, it was not illegal in 1951 and is not illegal today, as long as the tissue, such as an appendix, was removed with consent.
According to a report issued in 1999, more than 300 million such tissue samples gathered from 178 million people were stored in labs and other facilities in the United States alone. Still, the law is vague about whether and when patients have a right to control their tissues.
Although the book is not perfect, Skloot has written an eye-opening account of a milestone in medical research. It is surprising that it took this long for the full story to be told.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot; 369 pp., Crown; $26.
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
| 17 March 2010
So many unkind ways to begin a discussion of Don DeLillo’s new novel present themselves, I can hardly bring myself to choose.
First and easiest: This should be called “Pointless Omega” (ba-bum!). Or how about: If you think $24 is a lot to spend for a 117-page novel, don’t worry, you’ll get your money’s worth -- because it reads like a thousand!
But I suppose I should behave like a grown-up, despite bitterness at having wasted several nights of my life struggling through this little monstrosity, and say that Point Omega will once again revive the literary dispute incited most famously by Ernest Hemingway.
Readers of Hemingway’s story Big Two-Hearted River divide into two camps. One finds in it a young man recovering from the horrors of World War I. Another finds a precisely described solo fly fishing expedition.
The story is the most perfect example of Hemingway’s “iceberg” principle, by which a writer, once he has a deep understanding of a subject, strengthens a piece of fiction by leaving most of the information out. Hemingway knew the horrors of World War I, having served as an ambulance driving and gotten wounded for his trouble, and so Big Two-Hearted River is about a man recovering from shell shock, if the reader cares to see it.
Point Omega by contrast is supposed to be about the Iraq War and the imbecilities of self-deception by which intelligent and sophisticated high-ranking American officials led us into its particular variety of horror. DeLillo is certainly knowledgeable about such things. For going on 40 years he’s been one of our top novelists, with such modern classics to his credit as White Noise (1985), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), and my favorite, Libra, his 1988 fictional speculation on what Lee Harvey Oswald was really up to in the Texas School Book Depository.
Yet for all the deep knowledge DeLillo may have left out of Point Omega, it is mainly a story about two men talking. With a nonsensical subplot about a missing woman. And portentous reference, fore and aft, to an art installation presenting Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down to a runtime of 24-hours, start to finish.
An older man named Richard Elster, a professional smart guy –what’s lately come to be termed a “public intellectual” – has retreated to the Southwestern desert after taking part in the planning for the Iraq War. He’s followed by Jim Finley, a slightly addled aspiring filmmaker who wants Elster to star in his one-take documentary about the war. Elster can’t make up his mind, but he seems to like the attention.
DeLillo, a terrific writer, wrings suspense out of the very minor question: Will Elster participate in the movie or not? Most of the action, such as it is, consists of two men sitting in the desert talking (and also drinking, quite a lot). And even though this talk – whether about the war, or about filmmaking, or poetry, or whatever – amounts to almost nothing, DeLillo still manages it make it interesting.
And that’s despite preposterous exchanges like this one, when Elster asks Finley why he’s so skinny, even though he eats. ‘”I seem to eat. I do eat. But all the energy, all the nourishment gets sucked up by the film,’ I tell him. ‘The body gets nothing.’” That’s the kind of line that gets a book thrown across the room. But this is DeLillo, so have patience.
But patience is not rewarded. After awhile – perhaps even DeLillo grew bored -- Elster’s troubled daughter, Jessie, shows up, sent to the desert by her mother to get her away from an unsuitable man in New York. The shy and sensitive Finley becomes sexually obsessed with her, although she’s entirely indifferent to him. And then one day she disappears.
The will-he/won’t-he dance between Elster and Finley is swept away in the search for Jessie. As days go by with no sign of her in the desert, Elster crumbles into old age, decrepitude, senility. Finley thinks Jessie may have come to the desert to commit suicide. She certainly acted depressed.
Don’t expect any resolution to Jessie’s disappearance though. That would be for a very different book, one actually concerned with people, rather than the big-headed concept of the Omega Point, cooked up by the French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as the key transitional state in the evolution of consciousness. Or something.
In other words, Point Omega is a novel of ideas, not story, not character, despite the illusion of story and the simulacrum of character. It opens and closes with some poor wretch obsessed with an art installation called 24 Hour Psycho (which actually exists).
Yeah, yeah, I realize 24 Hour Psycho is supposed to serve as a kind of chorus, commenting on the “action” of the novel. I know that Elster’s solipsism, which ruins Jessie, also influences the awful war. I know that Point Omega is an apocalyptic novel, examining the point at which human mind fades into exhausted insensibility, or explodes into God consciousness.
But who cares? Not me. This game is not worth the candle.
Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
Point Omega, by Don DeLillo; Scribner, 117 pp.; $24.
| 21 February 2010
Novelist Chris Bohjalian.
Empathy pays.
In a confessional age, when the memoir has replaced the novel as the primary literary form, Chris Bohjalian is a bit of an anachronism.
In one bestselling novel after another, he wields that always rare literary gift, the ability to create believable characters far removed from his own background and experience.
Black children, transsexuals, homeless people, Germans and Jews alike in World War II, and women – most especially women – Bohjalian has written convincingly about them all.
“I love the idea you think I have empathy,” Bohjalian says, speaking by phone from a Denver stop on his current book tour. “I need to sit you down with my sisters-in-law, who think I’m a classic middle-aged guy who doesn’t get it.”
Tell it to Bohjhalian’s devoted following of mostly female readers. Accompanied by a flotilla of rave reviews, his latest, Secrets of Eden, debuted at No. 5 on The New York Times bestseller list Feb. 14. A representative assessment, from the Seattle Times: “These characters seem real, and what happens to them feels like it matters.”
No stranger to South Florida, the Vermont-based Bohjalian will be in the area this week for three appearances to talk about Secrets of Eden, a novel of domestic abuse, and also about his previous novel, the Holocaust-themed Skeletons at the Feast.
“I will never tire of talking about ‘Skeletons at the Feast,’ ” Bohjalian says. “It will always be an important book to me because of the material. It’s an exploration of the complicity of an average German family in the Holocaust, and whenever I talk about it I’m reminded of the remarkable people I interviewed for this book.”
But Bohjalian says he expects to feel the same way about Secrets of Eden, a story of domestic abuse and murder in a small Vermont town. In its first ten days on sale he had already heard from “55 or 60 women” who say it reminds them of their own lives.
“I know my books aren’t going to change the world,” Bohjalian says. “First and foremost I hope I’m writing a ripping good yarn. A 105,000-word op-ed would be pretty dull for most readers and it wouldn’t raise visibility for whatever issue I’m exploring.”
Born in New York, raised partly in Miami, Bohjalian got his big break in 1997 when Oprah Winfrey selected his fifth novel, Midwives, for her television book club. The story of a midwife embroiled in legal trouble after a patient dies, Midwives shocked many female readers when they discovered Bohjalian is a man.
“There were midwives and women who questioned whether I had the moral authority to write about the place of birth in our country because I’m a male and not a midwife,” Bohjalian says. “Since then, people are less likely to question my credentials. I’ve written so many books people start to trust me. They know I will respect their story and I will do my homework.”
And therein lies the secret to Bohjalian’s success – his willingness to conduct extensive research and interviews. As a result, he says, he has no trepidation about “diving” into subjects like the Holocaust, even though he’s not Jewish.
And yet, as a novelist, Bohjalian resists the temptation to “lean too heavily” on that research. Quoting fellow novelist Jay Parini, he says only about 10 percent of his research makes it into the final book. The remainder makes him more knowledgeable and allows him to deepen his characters.
Research can also alter the course of a Bohjalian book. Originally, he envisioned only two point-of-view characters for Secrets of Eden: Stephen Drew, the adulterous Baptist minister, and Heather Laurent, a New Age writer with a tragedy in her own childhood. All that changed when he had lunch with Lauren Bowerman, Vermont’s assistant attorney general.
Bohjalian recalls asking about the damage a gunshot does to the human body. Bowerman, eating a cheeseburger, said, “Oh, you want to know about blowback, how much of the bastard’s brains were up the gun barrel.”
“I love everything about that sentence,” Bohjalian says, “the alliteration, the bluntness. I knew at that moment the fictional state attorney’s voice had to be in the book, too. And all of a sudden the book had more plot, and a more linear drive. That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t done my research.”
Bohjalian, the son of an advertising executive, has often said he did not find his writing voice until he abandoned his own New York advertising career and moved to Vermont.
“I was trying to write hip, Jay McInerny-Bret Easton Ellis kind of novels,” he says. “When I got to Vermont I no longer felt pressure to be the coolest guy in the bar. I could write about things that really interested me: family, raising kids, marriages. I don’t want to give the impression I don’t love New York, but I wouldn’t have become a very good novelist if I’d stayed there."
Perhaps less known is the origin of Bohjalian’s love of reading, which was fostered in a public library in Hialeah. In 1973, Bohjalian’s family moved from Connecticut to Miami Lakes, where his new orthodontist fitted him with an appliance that “looked like the business end of a backhoe.”
“I had to wear this thing for four hours a day, and I certainly wasn’t going to wear it to my new school,” Bohjalian says. “So I’d come home from Palm Springs Junior High and then go to Hialeah Lakes Public Library with my headgear on. I have the best memories of reading in the library.
"Looking back, that’s were I fell in love with the novel instead of short stories or poems or the newspaper. It was that autumn, in the eighth grade.”
Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
Chris Bohjalian appearances
A Literary Afternoon with Chris Bohjalian, 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, at the Beifield Auditorium at the Harvey and Phyllis Sandler Center for Jewish Life Enhancement, 21050 95th Ave., Boca Raton. $20. For more, click here. Or call 561-852-3241.
Chris Bohjalian at Books & Books bookstore, 8 p.m. Wednesday. Free. 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Click here for more information. Or call 305-442-408.
An Evening with Chris Bohjalian, sponsored by the JCC of the Palm Beaches, 7 p.m. Thursday at a private residence. $36. For information and directions, call Sharon Lowenstein at 561-676-4104, or click here.
