‘Attention’ demands your focus
“Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction” (Random House), by Joshua Cohen
If curiosity is a writer’s greatest innate gift, Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer. Or maybe just the most focused. His first collection of non-fiction, emblazoned with the word “Attention” four times in bold font like crime scene tape on the cover, is dazzling in its scope, but, oh the irony, it’s also very hard to get through.
There are 46 pieces here, about everything from the Ringling Bros. circus to Bernie Sanders. And those are just a couple recognizable topics. Throw in deep dives about Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, 1936 German Olympian Helene Mayer, and 29 pages about the author’s journey to Azerbaijan in search of wisdom from the “Mountain Jews” living in the Caucasus mountains, and what you have is a hodgepodge of writing that makes your head spin.
Digested in very small doses — an essay per night before bed, say, or a short one on the john — it will still take you weeks to reach the end of this book.
And when you get there, you’ll probably have forgotten how Hrabal redeemed Socialist Realism.
Still, writing like this does deserve some praise.
Cohen truly commits to his subjects, dropping knowledge and literary criticism all over the place. On Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s juxtaposition of natives and conquerors: “He has always believed that one tradition can, and does, reinforce the other, but it seems that his belief gutters out when the indigenous becomes the popular.”
The whole book is like that, filled with topics that will be foreign to most readers, forcing them to really engage if they want to comprehend any of it. Despite the author’s disdain for our modern society of distraction, it also helps to have Google close at hand.
If you enjoyed Cohen’s singular novel “Book of Numbers,” you’ll find essays here to love, too.
You’ll just have to work at it.
“Bindi” (Little, Brown), by Paul Matthew Maisano
Any parent would be proud of Birendra, the 8-year-old boy who is the central character of “Bindi,” the debut novel of Paul Matthew Maisano.
Born in India, Birendra is bright, sweet and thoughtful, despite fateful events that take his family from him. He is so kind and good in the face of adversity, however, that his story, despite interesting twists, is often too saccharine.
Birendra’s story, set mainly in 1993, shifts among three locales — the coastal Indian town of Verlaka where he was born and becomes an orphan, west London where his married aunt lives and wellto-do Hollywood where his adoptive mother resides. All are rendered by Maisano with convincing and informative cultural and descriptive touches.
The narrative also is built on troubling events, including the deaths of parents and the breakup of families and relationships. One of the main characters – Birendra’s Aunt Nayana, the twin sister of his mother – is drawn with depth and complexity. An academic achiever in west London, she moves from an adulterous affair to the verge of an emotional breakdown.
This gives dramatic substance to the story of an orphaned boy on a journey around the globe. But too many scenes move slowly with simplistic events and dialogue; they seem written for readers about Birendra’s age.
These include scenes with Madeline, the rich, self-absorbed single woman from Hollywood who adopts Birendra on a sudden impulse, and her brother, Edward, a much-needed adult male figure in the boy’s new life in America.
This boy is smart and kind at the start, in the middle and at the end of the book. This is good for Birendra, but not the novel.
“Seeds of Science: Why we got it so wrong on GMOs” (Bloomsbury), by Mark Lynas.
Mark Lynas has written a timely and important book about changing sides on the controversial topic of genetically modified crops, or GMOs. Whether you support or oppose that technology, “Seeds of Science” is full of surprises.
Lynas has a unique perspective: in the 1990s he was literally chopping down experimental crop fields in Britain. He also helped plan the symbolic occupation of a Monsanto office — the seed and pesticide company that German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG recently bought.
The book opens with a clear-eyed look at the early anti-GMO movement. But Lynas begins to ask questions, and finds that the slogans often didn’t reflect scientific consensus. In a 2015 poll, 88 percent of American Association for the Advancement of Science members said GMO foods are safe (yet only 37 percent of the public believes that).
In 2013, Lynas publicly switched sides, causing “bitter conflict” with former friends.
“Seeds of Science” includes painstaking but necessary details: the origins of GMO technology in the 1970s; early concerns of scientists; and a key discovery: some soil bacteria transfer DNA into plants. In other words, moving DNA from one species to another can happen naturally.
In Africa and India, Lynas finds GMO research with the potential to cut pesticide use and increase profits for small farmers by using natural disease resistance in some genes. The new crops weren’t owned by a global conglomerate, yet activists still furiously opposed them. In Uganda, GMO opponents told Muslims that pig genes would be inserted in corn, exploiting the religious prohibition on eating pork.
“Seeds of Science” makes a convincing case that some anti-GMO rhetoric is flawed, but Lynas resists the urge to simply bash the other side. One chapter is titled “What the AntiGMO Activists Got Right.”