High Five: Literary Nonfiction

(In this issue's High Five, fiction writer and journalist Michael Downs picks his favorite works of nonfiction.)

This is today's five. Tomorrow's five will be different. Ask again in a week, you might get five books I didn't mention today. There's no way to choose five. Is it the five I'd give students for a course in literary nonfiction? Or the five I'd wrap in red and green and leave under a Christmas tree for my niece and nephew, with a note that reads: "If you read only five books of nonfiction in your lives, they must be these"? Or is it the titles I’d grab in a nightmare, the handful I'd rescue as the Thought Police battered my door demanding I give up my library? The ones I'd bury in a time capsule? The ones I'd want buried with me in a tomb like a pharaoh and his favorite wives?

Here are a few good books. They are subversive, surprising, moving. I'd like people to read these books. If I were Oprah, people would read these books.

John Hersey, Hiroshima

What book of nonfiction has ever had upon publication a greater impact, or a more lasting one? The New Yorker published Hersey’s masterwork of literary journalism in a single issue of its magazine in 1946. When the book appeared, The Book of the Month club sent a copy to each of its subscribers. According to Hersey’s obituary in The New York Times, there is an often-told tale that Albert Einstein ordered a thousand copies to send wide and far. The book, a 152-page recounting of the blast told through the stories of six survivors, is as compelling in its mix of humanity and horror as any book of war could ever be. Sixty years later, Hiroshima remains a compelling argument for Hersey’s old-fashioned literary journalism. Today's fashion is to include the literary journalist as a character in her or his own report, almost as a memoirist. Not so in Hersey's day. He never mentions himself, never writes in first person. His labor was his meticulous reporting in a wrecked landscape; his magic is how he steps off that stage, existing only in each carefully selected fact and carefully selected word. His words are chosen for their restraint and beauty, for their ability to bear the burden of a horrifying new world. He calls the atomic blast "a sheet of the sun” and a flash “whiter than any white." "Thousands of people had nobody to help them," he writes. "Miss Sasaki was one of them. Abandoned and helpless, under the crude lean-to in the courtyard of the tin factory, beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a face any more, she suffered awfully that night from the pain in her broken leg. She did not sleep at all; neither did she converse with her sleepless companions." Such writing ensures that Hersey himself was not the only witness to Hiroshima’s aftermath; no one can read his book and claim never to have seen.

Tom Zoellner, The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire

Thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio and the movie Blood Diamond (2006), we should by now all know about the harrowing link between diamond profits and war in some African countries. But Zoellner's book (released a bit earlier in 2006) reports that and more. Zoellner, a former newspaper reporter, traveled from India to Africa to the Arctic Circle to tell the story of diamonds and to learn how diamonds became our essential metaphor for love. Fueled by confusion over his own broken wedding engagement and what to do with the diamond ring his fiancée returned to him, Zoellner explores the need of people to equate love with eternity. He understands diamonds and geology, sociology, history, psychology, and economy. He writes about child labor in polishing houses in India, smuggling in Africa, hip-hop and bling in the Big Apple, and does so with a generous heart and often lyrical prose. Through reporting John Hersey would admire, Zoellner explains how De Beers, a global diamond company, controlled the diamond market and its marketing to yield billions of dollars in profits from a gem that is essentially useless. "In the face of a baffling universe," he writes, "and with the foreknowledge of certain death, is it any wonder that the mind gravitates toward something claiming to be eternal that we can grasp in our hands? ... We want the thing that is said to be the hardest to find, that raises us over the rest of humanity in a twinkling—that turns women into princesses and men into lords, if only for a moment. The diamond has been set up almost arbitrarily to be this key to deep down longings, a heart outside of the heart, the shining irreducible moment in clear carbon that is supposed to make us forget our failings and mortality. From the river mines and battlefields of Central Africa to the suffocating polishing factories of India and the Arctic camps and Siberian labs where men and women risked their lives in pursuit of the star that stands for love, they all bent to serve the myth around which we wound our hungry dreams."

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

This small gem (88 pages), first published in 1969, mixes essay with history with legend. It expands the possibility of what nonfiction is and makes plain the revelation that fact and truth reside in all the stories. Momaday's concern is the journey his Kiowa ancestors made when they left the place we now call Yellowstone Park and traveled south into the plains, arriving in Oklahoma near a knoll they named Rainy Mountain. The book's structure is poetic, and difficult to describe. Between a prologue and an epilogue, Momaday collects chapters. Each chapter consists of three short paragraphs. One of these paragraphs relates a legend of the Kiowa on their journey, another a fragment of Momaday's tribal or family history, and the third his own meditation. Or some combination of those. The short paragraphs are linked in sometimes obvious, sometimes associative, or sometimes imagistic ways. The book is quiet, even in the midst of storms or violence, as if subdued by a stew of grief and celebration and an understanding that the world is long and everlasting. "Years ago," Momaday writes, "there was a box of bones in the barn, and I used to go there to look at them. Later someone stole them, I believe. They were the bones of a horse which Momaday called by the name 'Little Red.' It was a small bay, nothing much to look at, I have heard, but it was the fastest runner in that whole corner of the world. White men and Indians alike came from far and near to match their best animals against it, but it never lost a race. I have often thought about that red horse. There have been times when I thought I understood how it was that a man might be moved to preserve the bones of a horse—and another to steal them away."

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

This winner of the 2005 National Book Award has been called "stunning," "electric," "powerful," "searing," "lucid," etc. Do not let this praise-turned-into marketing drive you away. Instead, ask what you would do if you sat down for dinner with your spouse of forty years and he collapsed and died. After the rush to the hospital, after the funeral and disposition of the body, after the letters of sympathy stopped filling your mail box, would you read his autopsy report? Would you make an investigation of his death, of the nature of grief and of your own? Would you write this passage? "According to the Emergency Department Physician's Record the patient was seen at 10:15 p.m. The physician’s notation ended: 'Cardiac arrest. DOA–likely massive M.I. Pronounced at 10:18 p.m.' According to the Nursing Flow Chart the IV was removed and the patient extubated at 10:20 p.m. At 10:30 p.m. the notation was 'wife at bedside—George, soc. worker, at bedside with wife'." Would you read all scraps of the record of your spouse's death so you could write something like this, from the doorman's log in the apartment building where Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived?

"NOTE: Paramedics arrived at 9:20 p.m. for Mr. Dunne. Mr. Dunne was taken to hospital at 10:05 p.m.

NOTE: Lightbulb out on A-B passenger elevator."

Would you work so hard to control what can't ever be controlled?

John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers

When John Edgar Wideman's brother worked his way through the court system and into prison, Wideman tried to write about the experience in fiction. It didn't work. "The fiction writer was also a man with a real brother behind real bars," he notes in Brothers and Keepers. "I continued to feel caged by my bewilderment, by my inability to see clearly, accurately, not only the last visit with my brother, but the whole long skein of our lives together and apart. So this book. This attempt to break out, to knock down the walls." Where fiction failed, nonfiction triumphs. Wideman’s book, part memoir, part biography, part essay and meditation, is an effort of will. The writer places himself in the midst of chaos and somehow—through intellectual power, artistic talent, love?—grasps a city, a family, a racial divide, an imprisoned brother, a life, and gives form to things that will never quite make sense. Why is his brother Robby in prison? Why is his big brother not? "[P]eople and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is.—The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way or another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape of your life from the rest of us, when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad." Through the rest of the book, Wideman tries on voices and identities, travels through time, crafts monologues that probe the world that shaped him and his brother, and other monologues that probe his own identity. Brothers and Keepers is a struggle to tell the story of a struggle. There are no easy lessons for writer or reader, for keepers or for brothers. Just love and art and the words that make the two real.