In my earlier days, I used to travel a lot. In my twenties and thirties, every two or three years I would take off anywhere from two months to a year and journey to some exotic locale. After meeting my wife when I was 38, the pattern continued: we took three trips lasting two months each to Kenya and to India, Nepal and Tibet. Then things changed somewhat: we still took an exotic trip every couple of years, but now limited to just a couple weeks duration.
But after 2010, when we went to Morocco for a couple weeks, the traveling came to a halt for a variety of reasons. I mourn that loss of travel; it had been an essential rhythm of my life. I still hope we can resume traveling at some point.
With those thoughts as preface, you can imagine how thrilled I was to see the new book by Ken Jennings, 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife, published today. Hey! If for some reason I don’t get to travel any more in this lifetime, that doesn’t mean it has to end completely!
Jennings writes well-researched books presented in a breezy, humorous style, similar to the work of Mary Roach. He was an anonymous software engineer until 2004, when a 74-game, $2.5 million streak on the television game show Jeopardy catapulted him to fame. Among the topics he’s written about in earlier books are cartography and its aficionados (Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks), parenting and its deficients (Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids), and comedy and its practitioners (Planet Funny: How Comedy Ruined Everything). In this book, he takes through the afterlife imaginings of religions, mythologies, literature, art and pop culture from around the world. The answer is, “What book is truly to die for?”
The book covers some of the most renowned don’t-miss destinations that should be on everyone’s kick the bucket list. There is Hades, which, though described by Virgil as a dim and colorless place, you can stil have the thrill of seeing Cerberus, the three-headed dog, Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill, or Tityus, chained to a boulder as vultures nibble on his liver. There’s the Norse god Odin’s hall of the slain, Valhalla, entered through 540 doors, each wide enough to accommodate 800 men at a time. Jennings suggests you treat yourself to a cup of ale served by the Valkyries, who work as barmaids when not occupied by their other job as death maidens in armor dripping with blood.
Judaism offers what might be considered the all-inclusive Club Med of the afterlife, at least in a vision described by rabbis beginning in medieval times. Getting there isn’t easy: you have to spend a year passing through the hellish Gehenna, with its pits of fire, black worms and angels bashing your teeth in with rocks. Oh, but then, the archangel Michael will welcome you to Gan Eden, where the rivers flow with your choice of milk and honey or wine and oil. A single grape will produce enough wine to refill your glass thirty times, and the Tree of Life bears a half million varieties of fruit.Hmmm...I can’t help but notice that the menu Jennings describes is entirely beverages and fruit. This leads me to suspect that a new set of teeth doesn't come with the deal.
On second thought, I’m thinking that Mahayana Buddhism offers the better Club Med experience. Buddhism generally touts the goal of reaching Nirvana, the complete abandonment of self. Indeed, in the advance copy of 100 Places to See After You Die that I’m reading, the chapter on Nirvana consists of a single blank page. I think this is a joke, but I plan to confirm this with the actual published book. However, in this other strain of Buddhism, the monk Amitabha vowed that when he reached perfection it would manifest into a beautiful destination for all those who call upon his name in the moment of death. This so-called Western Paradise offers beautiful landscapes, jeweled pavilions, and hundreds of delicacies served at every meal.
Some places you’ve enjoyed in reading during your lifetime are included as destinations in the afterlife: Aslan’s Country, from C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles; The Bridge, from Flannery O’Connor’s posthumously published short story “Revelations; the Bardo as presented in George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo; the realms described by Dante and by Milton; and many more. Even Hogwarts makes the list.
The pop culture itinerary was for me the weakest part of the book’s journey, offering quick looks at dozens of afterlife portrayals in movies, television, songs and theater. Mildly amusing, but for me not as interesting as the preceding sections.
Finally...OMG, can we please have Trump’s various trials relocated to Diwu, the underworld Dark City of Chinese mythology!
This is a purgatorial world of ten tribunals, each the jurisdiction of a legendary judge-king….Each court is divided into sixteen wards, and each ward includes punishments for eight different sins, so many of the offenses addressed here are charmingly specific: people who complained about the weather, people who threw broken pottery shards over the fence (Han dynasty litterbugs!), people who borrowed books and didn’t return them.
The accounting may be thorough, but the penalties are brutal. You might be sawed in half, drowned in a pool of blood, pounded to meat jelly in a giant mortar, boiled in hot oil. The lustful are placed next to a superheated brass pillar, which they will repeatedly throw their arms around, mistaking it for their beloved. Arsonists are fed through a rice-husking machine, and committers of infanticide get iron snakes slithering in and out of their eyes and ears and mouth.
But the most diabolical torture of all is a simple tower called the Terrace for Viewing One’s Own Village. Climb up and take a clear-eyed look at your earthly hometown. Surprise! You’ve been completely forgotten! Nobody is praying for you, your last wishes have been disregarded, your partner has remarried, and your heirs are squandering your hard-earned possessions.
Truly, this is the judicial prosecution of Trump’s multiple sins and crimes that is the stuff of dreams for me.
BOOK NEWS
The biggest and most annoying book news of the week was the announcement by author Elizabeth Gilbert of the publication date of her next novel The Snow Forest for next February...and within a week announcing that she was postponing it. Why? Because she had received a torrent of angry criticism and one-star reviews (of a book none of the reviewers had read) because she committed the callous, heartless sin of writing a novel set in Russia. How dare she reward Russia and undercut Ukraine in this way, the people raged.
This one makes me really angry, even more than the demands that authors refrain from writing about any culture other than their own, even more than the ‘cleaning up’ of old books by editing out references that might offend modern sensibilities. What in the hell do all these idiots think writing is about? For the record, the novel is set in the 1930s and is about a family who is trying to resist the Russian government.
It is hard to understand both the reasons for the outrage, and for why Gilbert gave in to this pressure. I enjoyed her memoir Eat Pray Love and her novels The Signature of All Things and City of Girls. As author Rebecca Makkai is quoted in this article on the controversy in the New York Times (the link should be free for all to read): “So apparently, wherever you set your novel, you’d better hope to hell that by publication date (usually about a year after you turned it in) that place isn’t up to bad things, or you are personally complicit in them.”
THIS WEEK’S NEW NOTABLE NONFICTION
- Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, by Christian Cooper. The author is the self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City...and who in that park was the target of a white woman in the now-infamous incident. One morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a white dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation. In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to that incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.
- Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, by Christopher Clark. As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past: The men and women of 1848 saw the urgent challenges of their world as shaped profoundly by the past, and saw themselves as inheritors of a revolutionary tradition. Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and filled with a cast of charismatic figures, including the social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, the writer George Sand, and the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, who struggled to reconcile his faith with politics, Revolutionary Spring offers a new understanding of 1848 that suggests chilling parallels to our present moment. “Looking back at the revolutions from the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be struck by the resonances,” Clark writes. “If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848.”
- End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin. The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.
- Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart, by Rose Styron. A memoir of an extraordinary life—poet, international human rights activist, founding member of Amnesty International USA, journalist, hostess, famous beauty, foreign policy advisor; friend to politicians, movie stars, the legendary; discoverer of Philip Roth, longtime wife of Bill Styron and together, America’s literary golden couple at home and abroad. An intimate portrait of a celebrated magic life and the famous and infamous who dropped in, summered, traveled with, played with, and the decades of friendship with everyone from Truman Capote and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys, the Bernsteins, Alexander Calder, John Hersey, and Lillian Hellman. She writes about James Baldwin moving in to Styron’s writing studio and writing The Fire Next Time, with Baldwin encouraging Styron to write The Confessions of Nat Turner in first person. Here as well are the years of dedication and risk, traveling the world, from Pinochet’s Chile to El Salvador, Belfast, and Sarajevo, as Rose Styron, in search of those hiding from dictators and autocrats, bore witness to atrocities and human rights violations.
- Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, by Jennifer Pahlka. A bold call to reexamine how our government operates—and sometimes fails to—from President Obama’s former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get. But it’s not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today’s world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government. Learn more about Jennifer Pahlka's work at recodingamerica.us.
- The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, by Rachel L. Swarns. In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion. Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shinning a light on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.
- The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War, by James B. Conroy. The first full account of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, the secret ten-day parlay in Morocco where FDR, Churchill, and their divided high command hammered out a winning strategy at the tipping point of World War II. In a secret, no-holds-barred, ten-day debate in a Moroccan warzone, protected by British marines and elite American troops, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton Jr., Sir Alan Brooke, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Sir Harold Alexander, and their military peers questioned each other’s competence, doubted each other’s vision, and argued their way through choices that could win or lose the war. You will be treated to a master class in strategy by the legendary statesmen, generals, and admirals who overcame their differences, transformed their alliance from a necessity to a bond, forged a war-winning plan, and glimpsed the postwar world.
- Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a disturbing social media trend emerged: a large number of yoga instructors and alt-health influencers were posting stories about a secretive global cabal bent on controlling the world’s population with a genocidal vaccine. Instagram feeds that had been serving up green smoothie recipes and Mary Oliver poems became firehoses of Fox News links, memes from 4chan, and prophecies of global transformation. Since May 2020, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker have used their Conspirituality podcast to expose countless facets of the intersection of alt-health practitioners with far-right conspiracy trolls. Now this expansive and revelatory book unpacks the follies, frauds, cons and cults that dominate the New Age and wellness spheres and betray the trust of people who seek genuine relief in this uncertain age.
- Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America, by Audrey Clare Farley. In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution. The case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets, they soon found, was hardly so straightforward. Contrary to fawning media portrayals of a picture-perfect Christian family, the sisters had endured the stuff of nightmares. Behind closed doors, their parents had taken shocking measures to preserve their innocence while sowing fears of sex and the outside world. In public, the quadruplets were treated as communal property, as townsfolk and members of the press had long ago projected their own paranoid fantasies about the rapidly diversifying American landscape onto the fair-skinned, ribbon-wearing quartet who danced and sang about Christopher Columbus. Even as the sisters’ erratic behaviors became impossible to ignore and the NIMH whisked the women off for study, their sterling image did not falter.
- The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future, by Peter Gleick. This book guides us through the long, fraught history of our relationship to this precious resource. Water has shaped civilizations and empires, and driven centuries of advances in science and technology—from agriculture to aqueducts, steam power to space exploration—and progress in health and medicine. But the achievements that have propelled humanity forward also brought consequences, including unsustainable water use, ecological destruction, and global climate change, that now threaten to send us into a new dark age. We must change our ways, and quickly, to usher in a new age of water for the benefit of everyone. Drawing from the lessons of our past, Gleick charts a visionary path toward a sustainable future for water and the planet.
- What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman. For millennia, owls have captivated and intrigued us. Our fascination with these mysterious birds was first documented more than thirty thousand years ago in the Chauvet Cave paintings in southern France. With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls are often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and foresight. But what does an owl really know? And what do we really know about owls? Though our fascination goes back centuries, scientists have only recently begun to understand in deep detail the complex nature of these extraordinary birds. Some two hundred sixty species of owls exist today, and they reside on every continent except Antarctica, but they are far more difficult to find and study than other birds because they are cryptic, camouflaged, and mostly active in the dark of night.
- Many Things Under a Rock: The Mysteries of Octopuses, by David Scheel. Of all the creatures of the deep blue, none is as captivating as the octopus. In Many Things Under a Rock, marine biologist David Scheel investigates four major mysteries about these elusive beings. How can we study an animal with perfect camouflage and secretive habitats? How does a soft and boneless creature defeat sharks and eels, while thriving as a predator of the most heavily armored animals in the sea? How do octopus bodies work? And how does a solitary animal form friendships, entice mates, and outwit rivals? Octopuses are complex, emotional, and cognitive beings; even as Scheel unearths explanations for the key mysteries that have driven his work, he turns up many more things of wonder that lurk underneath. This is the story of what we have learned and what we are still learning about the natural history and wondrous lives of these animals with whom we share our blue planet.
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