Melanie Challenger How to Be Animal

It’s easy to see that our morals and ethics are lagging far behind our scientific understanding and the technology it enables.  The missing link is philosophy.  It’s not easy or popular, but Melanie Challenger is up to the challenge.  In How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human, Challenger breaks down a number of complicated problems and perspectives, analyzing the origins and natures of our beliefs, and offers a vision for a more consistent approach with regards to “being human” in our natural world. 

Challenger has an uncanny ability to define and dissect what many hold to be the crowning difference of humanity from the rest of the natural world – the human mind, and in so doing, makes her point that nothing happens without the body, and that the human body is not so different from every other sort of animal body.  She segues effortlessly to dehumanization, riffs on trans-humanism, and is adept at demonstrating the power of ethics and morals as applied to both humans as animal and animals in a world ruled by the predator (supposedly) with a conscience.

Brevity is her friend.  She makes her points and entertains the mind in the process.  We are blazing into uncharted waters, creating problems and evading solutions by reframing the problem as a solution.  Hypocrisy will only get us so far.  Reality always wins out in the end, and that’s when we need a book like this to firmly and logically show us the worth and power of not just our intellect, but our emotions, our compassion.  If we honestly and fully direct our thoughts at the full spectrum of life, we’ll understand the continuity, the unbroken line between our highest achievements and the wondrous life of a single cell.  The future, William Gibson told us, has arrived – it’s just not evenly distributed.  Melanie Challenger gives us the tools to explore the incoming hints of that future, to be human and remain animal, breathing, seeing, compassionate, alive.

Melanie Challenger did something quite remarkable in our conversation.  She used her own tools, those presented in How to Be Animal, to deal with a ripped-from-the-headlines (by YT) problem.  She is every bit as smart talking about her book as one might expect from reading it, and entertaining.  Here’s the link, or listen below in the event you find yourself in the midst of your own ripped-from-the-headlines problem.

Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan The Handyman Method

It’s time to have one helluva lot of fun, so let Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan start, and finish, in grand style, the party. The Handyman Method is a horror novel about the perils of home improvement, which, if you’re a certain sort of person, should be obvious. Cutter and Robinson will quickly and enjoyably convince you said perils are not obvious.  It’s worse, so much so that you cannot imagine, but they certainly can.  Here’s the amazing bit.  Even as you are following the prose into realms of grotesquerie never before imagined, you are doing so because the sheer literary skill with which this novel is created is so superb, you cannot help but read the words. 

The Saban family – Trent, Rita and their son Milo, move into a new house, the first finished home in a future suburb.  Trent becomes obsessed with a YouTube hero, Handyman Hank, who seems to speak only to him.  Milo finds an icon in Blue, a sort of Muppet.  Rita tries to rise above.  Bad stuff happens, lots of it, early and often.  The authors, who write seamlessly, keep the reader balanced between laughter and screaming horror.  At first they work sort of quietly, but the details they layer in the prose stack up to create a unique and disturbing unreality.  You might grok that there’s some really highfalutin’ litrary skill on the prowl here, were you not giddy with terror that admits only bouts of barking laughter.

Happily for the reader, less so for the characters, all this layering pays off, when the rollercoaster goes right off the rails with a power dive into scenes that, well, you’ll find out.   You will hardly be able to put the book down, or turn the pages fast or slowly enough.  You’ll re-read bits immediately, thinking, “I’m a glutton for punishment!” and yes, you are, great literature can even do that. Cutter and Sullivan prove it. 

Nick Cutter and Andrew Sullivan did me the favor of giving me an interview as great as their novel.  Packed with great advice about writing, and what to wear when bats come to visit, it bears multiple listenings.  Here’s the direct link to download, so you can hear it again and again, or listen below, don’t drink milk though, it might wreck your computer.

Susan Casey The Underworld

Reading requires an effort on the part of the reader.  This participation makes it possible for books to have a lasting effect.  A reading experience can be transformative. Susan Casey’s latest book, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean is an eloquent example of the transformative power of great literature. 

To be sure, you definitely get a ripping yarn of a narrative.  The book begins with the author on the deck of a ship on a storm-tossed sea, hoping to join the (2-person) crew of a high-tech submersible in a voyage to, you guessed it, the bottom of the sea.  Then, she ratchets back to explain how she got on that deck and just exactly where she is going.  In fewer pages than might think possible, she will re-invent your vision of the Earth itself.  Towering waves, the steel-crushing pressures of the depths, these are all powerful forces, powerfully described.  Nature dwarfs us, but Casey proves the power of the written word is up to the challenge.

In The Underworld, Casey takes the reader on a historical and scientific journey.  We look at the earliest maps, gorgeous to see, with little understanding of what lies beneath all that water.  And here’s where Casey makes her transformative point; most of the earth is covered by water, most of that water is very deep, and the seafloor is incredibly varied, geographically active and diverse, and the home of far more life than we imagine.  And you’re off.

Casey’s ability to weave history with her own quest to get there and see the terrain she’s describing offers readers a joyously beautiful tapestry of narrative.  She uses this opportunity to weave themes of geography and biology with a sense of wonder.  She crafts powerful portraits of the men and women who explore the depths of the ocean.  She also speaks to the unknowns about this realm.  Most of the Earth is concealed from our everyday gaze.   It’s harder to explore the deep ocean than other planets, but Casey makes it clear that we’d better pay attention to this underworld.  It’s not rocket science to understand that ocean depths, currents and the huge geological events transpiring below directly impact what’s above.  We tinker, fish, mine, explore or exploit at our own considerable peril.

Make no mistake: Casey delivers the goods in spectacular fashion with regards to her intentions of deep-water adventure.  But she’s aiming for and finding a lot more than an entertaining underwater journey.  She quotes Rachel Carson often here, and goes on to complement, equal and expand on Carson’s environmental themes.  Early on, Casey tells us that for the ancient Greeks, a life-changing journey to the underworld was called a katabasis.  Homer’s The Odyssey is a good example – as is The Underworld.

Susan Casey is every bit as eloquent in person as she is in print.  Here’s a link to our conversation, or you can put down the oars, let the boat drift and listen below.