In David Szalay’s new book of artfully
linked stories, “air travel collapses
physical distance, but doesn’t seem
to help with the emotional kind,” said
Christopher Tayler in the Financial Times.
Each story is named after an airline
flight from one hub to another. In the
first, an elderly Englishwoman returning
home after visiting her cancer-stricken
son collapses during a turbulent flight
next to a Senegalese businessman. In
the next story, the businessman won-
ders if his driver is keeping a dreadful
secret. Szalay, “a gifted writer,” was
nominated for a Man Booker Prize for
his 2016 novel, All That Man Is, said
Dwight Garner in The New York Times.
At only 145 pages, Turbulence “occu-
pies thinner air,” with stories that rarely
exceed a dozen pages and “race by so
quickly” that it’s impossible to form a
lasting connection with any character,
whether a bed-hopping German pilot or
an impoverished Indian nurse desper-
ately trying to reach her battered sister.
But that may be by design. “These mel-
ancholy flights have a lot to say about
human impermanence.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
Greenland turns out to be a place more than
worthy of obsession, said Doug Bock Clark
in The New York Times. In an “engrossing”
new history of how the world awakened
to the importance of the ice-covered island,
journalist Jon Gertner “manages a magic
trick” by thematically linking the daring
of turn-of-the-20th-century explorers with
the vital research carried out by a parade of
post–World War II scientists. The first group
braved starvation and temperatures that
ran dozens of degrees below zero. The sec-
ond has shown over time that Greenland’s
2-mile-deep ice sheet holds a detailed history
of global climate change going back more
than 100,000 years, providing important
warnings about our future. The combina-
tion works beautifully. “It impressed on
me like nothing I’ve read how hard-earned
climate-change facts are.”
“It would be difficult
to think of a writer
as firmly out of
fashion as Rudyard
Kipling,” said Stacy
Schiff in The New
York Times. But the
popularity and influ-
ence Kipling once
enjoyed can’t be
denied, and author
Christopher Benfey
has generated fresh
insights into the Bombay-born Englishman’s
legacy by focusing on a crucial four years
when the already renowned writer made
his home in America. Shortly after marry-
ing a woman from Vermont in 1892, the
26-year-old Kipling settled in Brattleboro,
where he proceeded to produce the bulk
of his most popular work, including The
Jungle Book and Captains Courageous.
Though Kipling’s imperialism isn’t forgiven,
“Benfey eloquently argues not only that
Kipling’s engagement with the United States
made him the writer he became, but that he
lavishly returned the favor.”
Book of the week
Think of the book as “a geological detec-
tive story,” said Stephanie Hanes in
CSMonitor.com. In the early chapters, a
combination of curiosity and the pursuit
of glory drives Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen
to cross it by sled in 1888, and American
Robert Peary to follow close behind with
an expedition farther north that proved
Greenland to be an island. Peary doesn’t
come off well: He once had a barrel of bis-
cuits strewn on a beach just to watch the
local Inuit scramble for them. But knowl-
edge grows as the scientists who follow
learn to drill down to bedrock, extracting
long columns of ice and reading the lay-
ers. The data indicate that in the past, the
planet’s temperature has occasionally shot
upward very quickly, suggesting the exis-
tence of hazardous tipping points. Though
Gertner’s approach sidesteps today’s argu-
ments about global warming, he makes
“devastatingly clear” that Greenland’s ice
is today melting rapidly, and that if the col-
lapse of this ice sheet continues, it will soon
create devastating effects worldwide.
The story of postwar scientific discovery
on Greenland “could have survived on
its own without the earlier age of explo-
ration,” said Colin Dickey in The New
Republic. Gertner’s book would have been
better, in fact, if it had spent less time on
Peary and more on the Inuit who’ve inhab-
ited Greenland for 4,500 years. But the
book’s two halves are knit together by a
running theme: how people respond when
faced with their own mortality. While we
thrill at the dangers overcome by Nansen,
Peary, and the scientists who’ve read
Greenland’s warning signals, “it seems
clear that very soon we may not have to
venture to the remote Arctic to come face
to face with doom.”
The Ice at the End of the
World: An Epic Journey Into
Greenland’s Buried Past and
Our Perilous Future
by Jon Gertner (Random House, $28)
Novel of the week
Turb ule nc e
by David Szalay (Scribner, $25)
If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s
American Years
by Christopher Benfey (Penguin, $29)
Kipling experienced both bliss and sorrow
in this period, and Benfey “recounts it all
with a fine touch,” said Paul Kennedy in
The Wall Street Journal. Kipling loved
Vermont’s snow, described marriage as
blissful, and worked productively while
hobnobbing with Wil liam James and
Theo dore Roose velt. But whatever hap-
piness Kipling found in America ended
abruptly when he clashed with his brother-
in-law and the public took sides. Kipling
returned to Britain in 1896, and when he
visited the U.S. two years later, his 6-year-
old daughter died in New York of pneumo-
nia. He never returned.
He had, however, already made a lasting
mark, said Charles McGrath in The New
Yorker. Benfey depicts Kipling as deeply
conflicted about America—keen on the
nation’s ideals but less so about its rowdy
inhabitants. But his worldview remained
influential here for decades, with his spy
novel Kim becoming almost a bible to CIA
agents operating in 1950s Vietnam. Benfey
doesn’t even have to reach that far to prove
that Kipling and the U.S. had a symbiotic
relationship. If you reread The Jungle Book,
written in a state its author considered an
anarchic wilderness, “you begin to suspect
that Kipling, though terrified of lawlessness
and disorder, was also half in love with it.”
Aboard a 2007 expedition to Greenland
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