Susanne Paola Antonetta: The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here

The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here – Susanne Paola Antonetta – 978-0-8142-5780-7 – 248 pages – paperback – February, 2021 – Mad Creek Books – $22.95 – ebook editions available at lower prices

Sometimes one literally chances across a terrific book; it appears unbidden and takes over one’s complete attention. A surprise appearance in the daily maelstrom of life. This remarkable memoir by Susanne Paola Antonetta did just that for me, striking me like a lightning bolt out of the blue, and completely altering the trajectory of my thinking.

I’ve read alot of books and loved many of them. This book stopped me in my tracks. Reading it over the course of a few evenings, this author made me think and feel and understand another person’s experience, her deeply felt and beautifully described mind and being. That is quite an accomplishment and makes this a very special book indeed.

Antonetta brings us into her youth, the place of “Summerland” and her family’s life on the marshy border of the ocean in southern New Jersey. Like the descriptions of physics and astrophysics she intersperses between her memory pieces, her description of this place, the people in her family, and her own life are simultaneously dreamlike and definitive.

Her grandmother and mother are key figures throughout. And then she introduces her own experiences with bipolar disorder, drugs, and the trauma of electroshock treatment woven together with those brilliantly written descriptions of ideas in neuroscience and physics, and then there are her conversations with psychics and meditations on understanding their messages from inter-dimensional spaces. What a journey!

This is a memoir with great power and beauty, taking us into the past, the present and realms beyond, where ideas and perhaps the ground of being may or may not be found.

I won’t tell you much more about the book. I think you need to discover it for yourself. I loved it, and I really enjoyed speaking to Susanne as well. we had a terrific talk about this book and her writing.

This is a book I intend to re-read and work to understand more fully. Once is not enough.

“Antonetta tackles nothing less than consciousness and existence, employing an amalgam of science writing and mysticism. It’s hard to imagine another writer who could not only make such a project work but also make it seem natural and necessary.” —Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood.

Susanne Paola Antonetta is has written a number of books, including Make Me a Mother, Curious Atoms: A History with Physics, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, a novella, and four books of poetry. Her work has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Orion (one of my favorite magazines), the New Republic, and others. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Visit Susanne’s website for more information about her and her work.

You can buy the book from Bookshop.org.

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Erica Wagner: Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge – Erica Wagner – 9781620400524 – Bloomsbury – Paperback – 384 pages – $18 – February 5, 2019 – ebook versions available at lower prices

“A welcome tribute to the persistence, precision and humanity of Washington Roebling and a love-song for the mighty New York bridge he built.” – The Wall Street Journal

It is surprising to learn that Washington Roebling, builder of the Brooklyn Bridge and a major contributor to American industrialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, has never had a full biography before this one, written by the excellent essayist and critic, Erica Wagner. I found her account of Roebling’s life story completely compelling. His relationship with his famous father, John Roebling, his experience and important role in the Civil War, and the amazing years-long effort to build one of America’s most iconic – and still fully operational – bridges, is brilliantly set forth by Wagner. She documents the important involvement of Roebling’s brilliant wife, Emma Warren Roebling is the completion of the bridge after Roebling’s health was compromised by illness, and gives us a portrait of an extraordinary and representative American life.

Frequently confused with his more famous father, Roebling has been forgotten or ignored by many. Yet his life holds interest for modern readers for a variety of reasons. His story is very much an American one – his family emigrating from Germany, living on the early 18th century American frontier, fighting in the Civil War, and becoming a key figure in the establishment of a modern American industrial society. We learn that Roebling was himself surprisingly self aware psychologically, a constant observer of his own and others’ human nature, how much he suffered both physically and psychologically, wounded by the abuse of his powerful father, and how he overcame so many obstacles to live a long life, adapting to the rapid pace of social and business life during a remarkable period in American history.

Erica Wagner uses Roebling’s recently discovered personal memoir to reveal much about his life that cannot be understood simply from documenting the major events of his life and the built artifacts he left behind. Roebling’s achievements are significant. Wagner’s achievement is that she brings this relatively unknown and complex man and his family to life in prose, a wonderful gift to readers.

American writer and critic Erica Wagner was the literary editor of the London Times for seventeen years and is now a contributing writer for New Statesman and consulting literary editor for Harper’s Bazaar. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the Economist, Financial Times, and the New York Times, among other newspapers and magazines. She is the author of several books, including Ariel’s Gift, Seizure, and a collection of short stories called Gravity. She lives in London. It was a great pleasure for me to speak with her about this excellent book, and I hope Writerscast listeners will want to seek out and read this book as well.

“A masterful work of research, revelation and gripping narrative. It brings to pulsating life 19th-century New York and New Jersey and manages to be moving, too.” ―New Statesman, “Books of the Year”

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Rae DelBianco: Rough Animals (A Novel)

Rough Animals – Rae DelBianco – Arcade Publishing – hardcover – 9781628729733 – $24.99 – June 5, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower prices.

I’ve long believed that Cormac McCarthy is the most recent heir to the position held previously by William Faulkner, being the most intense and stimulating writer of his generation. Having read this first novel by the young writer, Rae DelBianco, I believe she will be the next in line to wear that particular literary crown. I do not believe I have read any fiction recently that is as powerful and hallucinatory as Rough Animals. The book grabs you by the head and heart immediately and simply never lets go. It can be painful, even horrific in places, to read this book. But I was captivated by the writing, the characters and the story – and found it impossible to put the book down. I needed to take breaks from reading this book, a sort of breath-catching effort is required for the reader to regather oneself, and be ready for the next emotional ride. And the descriptions of landscape, of animals and of people are simply stunning.

Intense is not quite enough to describe this novel. So after reading this book, and gathering my wits about me, I was really interested to talk to author DelBianco. I honestly don’t know how she managed to pull off this high-wire effort – writing a novel with this level of luminescence is just hard to do. Rough Animals is about a brother and sister who grow up hardscrabble on a small ranch in the very isolated Box Elder canyon of Utah. When the novel opens, and it does so with a scene that is at once powerful, artful, violent, and gripping, in a way that presages so much of the writing and storyline of the rest of the book, we are simply unprepared for the range, the depth of language and vision DelBianco exhibits.

The book goes on from there, McCarthy-like, in a spiritual saga of sometimes unexplainable violence and tenderness, across a brutal moon-like western landscape. The people in this book are sometimes like aliens, blasting themselves through a foreign galaxy on their way to discovering what it means to be a human being, while never really understanding how they got here in the first place.

Amazingly, for someone who has captured the language and beauty of the western landscape so well, DelBianco is actually not from the west. She grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a beautiful area not that far from Philadelphia, and she now lives in rural New Jersey, on a farm with her grandmother. How this author was able to transport herself into the modern wild west is a feat of almost superhuman imagination, with which I remain in awe. Delbianco has clearly set her sights on high ground, and with this novel, and has achieved something really remarkable – this is truly a brilliant first novel.

DelBianco has found her voice as a writer, and it’s a great one. I really recommend seeking out this novel and carving out a good block of time to spend with it. You will be richly rewarded. And I think hearing her talk about this novel, her writing, and the backstory behind this novel will make you want to read more from this new author.

Here is the author’s website, which is well worth a visit.

An interview with Rae DelBianco in Vogue magazine here. And Kirkus wrote a very good review of the book as well, here.

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Bill Bradley: We Can All Do Better

978-1593157296 – Vanguard Press – Hardcover – $24.99 (ebook versions available at lower prices)

Bill Bradley is one of my favorite contemporary politicians.  I felt badly for all of us when he left the national political scene and then went to work in investment banking.  Much like another politician I admire, Mario Cuomo, he is smart, well versed in a wide range of subjects, able to communicate complicated ideas without dumbing them down, and above all, he is passionately a humanist, who clearly likes people, and loves what America could and should be, as a leader on the world stage.

While I certainly do not agree with all of his ideas, what he has to say is well worth paying attention to, especially since he is so intelligent, and his arguments are so well reasoned, grounded in ideas and carefully constructed (how novel!)  Moreover, he represents what the current political discourse so desperately needs, namely leadership that does not trivialize, demonize or mock those with whom one disagrees.

Bradley believes deeply in the power of citizens to make change, and dispensing with so much of what goes for political discourse these days, in We Can All Do Better Bradley makes a strong case for why America cannot continue on its current deeply divided, politically gridlocked, and ineffectual political, social and foreign policy paths.

Bradley first reviews the current “state of the nation.”  He makes clear that, contrary to right wing pronouncements,  government is not the cause of our problems. He rightly points out the damaging and dangerous role of money and politics, talks cogently about why and how our existing foreign policy, electoral, and economic paths will lead to a dismal future for America, and sets forth clearly and coherently what needs to be done to for us to  make changes for the better.

As the book title says, “we can all do better.”  Rather than blaming and scapegoating (groups of other citizens, the other political party, or just government itself) or as so many do, simply ignoring what we don’t like, and disengaging from the political process, Bradley continually and powerfully makes his case we can all—elected officials and private citizens alike—do a better job together.  Bradley is a great voice for uniting rather than dividing, for working together, and for allowing ourselves to see more clearly who we are – and can be – as citizens and participants in the modern world.

Bill Bradley, born and raised in Missouri, was a star basketball player at Princeton, a Rhodes scholar, and then had a Hall of Fame career in the NBA.  He was a three term senator from New Jersey, and ran for president in 2000.  We Can All Do Better is his sixth book.  He’s been involved in investment banking and serves as a corporate director for a number of companies.  He hosts a radio show called American Voices on Sirius/XM satellite radio.
(“For 40 years, I’ve traveled around America listening to the stories Americans tell about their lives. I was always moved, and so I wanted to create a show where you can hear some of them too.” – Sen. Bill Bradley)

It was a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to speak to Senator Bradley about We Can All Do Better for Writerscast.  You can learn more about the book at Sen Bradley’s website.

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