Given today’s headlines, are you feeling nostalgic for a previous time, say, the 1950s, a period that for many too young to have lived through it may think the TV sitcom Happy Days captured the decade? Red Scare is by no means the first book to blow apart any perception that those were happier days, but what Clay Risen succeeds brilliantly in doing is not only bringing the days of McCarthyism to vivid life, but drawing a sharp line from those paranoid, reactionary times to today’s toxic far-right mix of conspiracy and resentment. For those who believe the aphorism that history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes, Red Scare pairs well with Orange Hair.
A novel about a man’s slow, and then very rapid, descent into Lewy-body dementia does not sound like the kind of book you would want at the top of your spring reading list, but you would be wrong. And that is because the tale is told in the second-person voice of the man’s wife, the unnamed narrator whose journey is leavened with humor, a sharp eye, and bracing asides. She loses the Leo she knew, of course, long before Leo leaves for good, but recalls how during the ordeal “his face remained unchanged, his hair was always white and thick, and his smile was his smile, and although he didn’t have a clue what he was laughing about, his laugh was his laugh.” This is a love story of authenticity, which means it is about despair, hope, and memory, and, odd as it sounds but trust me it works, has an ending that features an encounter between a fearsome squirrel and a brave cat in a Manhattan apartment late at night.
Why is north at the top of our maps and the south at the bottom? Viewed from space, the Earth has no compass points; in fact, when an Apollo 17 astronaut in 1972 took that famous “blue marble” photograph of the Earth from space (trust me, you’ve seen it), the South Pole was at the top of the frame, so NASA inverted the image lest earthlings suddenly be disoriented. In his marvelous book, Jerry Brotton explores, and makes us re-examine, our assumptions about direction and how we came up with our four compass points. The magnetic compass solidified north as a cardinal direction because of the Earth’s magnetic field, which aided early maritime navigation and accounted for maps having north at the top. But in ancient Egypt, south was at the top since that is where the Nile began, and the Aztecs had five directions, the fifth stretching from the heavens to Earth’s core. Four Points of the Compass is a witty, erudite read that will be enjoyed even by those who can’t leave their house without G.P.S.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl
