A View of the Ocean Trying Leviathan Journeys in the Night Ex Mex Book Reviews

A VIEW OF THE OCEAN, by Jan de Hartog. (Pantheon, .95.) In this slim memoir, Hartog, a noted novelist and playwright who died in 2002, sketches his mother: she’s the girl beneath the flowering cherry, the piously forbearing housewife and the white-haired “mischievous saint,” attested doer of good works in Japanese prison camp and Dutch retirement home alike. But at its heart, “A View of the Ocean” is an unsparing account of her death. De Hartog was a sort of northern European Hemingway: a best-selling novelist and legitimate hero of the Dutch resistance before he turned 30. But for all his physical and moral courage, he couldn’t bear nursing his mother in the last weeks of her life. He breaks down in the attempt — and the simple rhythm of his prose turns to a howl. In particular, he’s undone by the stench of her cancerous breath: “It defeated everything in me that wanted to help, to love, to succor.” This is painful to read, but that pain is necessary to understand why de Hartog — though a lifelong skeptic — turns to prayer, and to believe in the religious revelation that follows. The ending suggests he will convert to Quakerism. In fact, he did, adamantly, and went on to write several well-regarded novels about that faith.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image John Minihan/Evening Standard - Getty Images, from "Black Britain"

BLACK BRITAIN. A Photographic History. By Paul Gilroy. (Saqi, in association with Getty Images, paper, .) Photojournalism meets social history as Gilroy tracks the process of postwar black settlement in Britain. Above, the models Endy Cartnell, left, and Selina pose for a Chelsea boutique in April 1973.

TRYING LEVIATHAN: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, by D. Graham Burnett. (Princeton University, .95.) When historians of science lay down their dusty books, they must dream of finding a subject like the court case Maurice v. Judd. In December 1818, lawyers, scientists and laymen convened to argue a proposition before a jury of their peers: is a whale a fish? The case centered on whether a New York statute mandating the inspection of fish oil applied to three casks of whale oil owned by the merchant Samuel Judd. Burnett, an associate professor of history at Princeton, argues that more was at stake: this was a referendum on the status of science in public life. The star witness for the defense, Samuel Mitchill, an Enlightenment naturalist and New York’s pre-eminent scientific mind, lectured the courtroom on Linnaean classification and comparative anatomy and declared that “a whale is no more a fish than a man.” But he turned out to be this trial’s William Jennings Bryan, not its Clarence Darrow. The prosecutor William Sampson ran circles around Mitchill in cross-examination, humiliating the old philosopher in front of a packed gallery and in the newspapers that sensationalized the case. The narrative of the trial is often improbably entertaining — at one point, a whaling captain named Preserved Fish takes the stand. The author also sets off on frequent “departures, detours, loops” to explore larger questions about the place of science in American society. These excursions make “Trying Leviathan” better reading for historians than for a general audience. The brave few up for the heavy lifting, though, will find Burnett’s assiduous footnoting and careful explanation of his working method to be a valuable introduction to the way his quarter of the academy prosecutes its science.

JOURNEYS IN THE NIGHT: Creating a New American Theatre With Circle in the Square: A Memoir, by Theodore Mann. (Applause Theatre and Cinema, .95.) “It’s funny how life stitches things together,” Mann writes in this memoir of his career as the longtime artistic director of Circle in the Square, New York City’s first nonprofit theater. This is gross understatement: the fun of “Journeys in the Night” is found in the happy accidents, fantastic luck and fairy godmothers that enabled the Circle, which the author helped found in 1951, to achieve early success with plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, and then to endure and prosper. Like many who have an excellent command of the anecdote, though, Mann gets windy and repetitive when allowed to hold the stage for too long. His charisma and enthusiasm, as well as a good story and a great cast, carry the reader through the Circle’s early days and Mann’s bohemian Greenwich Village life. But decades of formulaic production histories dominate the book’s second act, and while Mann’s memory for casting, rehearsals and reviews is sharp, he offers little critical insight into the plays he produced and directed.

EX MEX: From Migrants to Immigrants, by Jorge G. Castañeda. (New Press, .95.) Castañeda is an interesting case: he’s an ex-Communist political scientist with several books to his credit; but he’s also a member of Mexico’s political class who served as former President Vicente Fox’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003 and mounted a maverick bid for the presidency in 2004. His latest book is a short primer on Mexican immigration to the United States, offered as “a Mexican perspective.” In it, Castañeda provides more than a century of historical context for current debates, covering the domestic politics and economic effects of emigration from his home country, as well as the more familiar story north of the border. “Ex Mex” is most interesting when Castañeda writes in the mode of a political insider. Most of his arguments are consonant with progressive voices in the United States, but he also has positive things to say about the pre-9/11 Bush administration, relating a series of high-level meetings that suggested there might be an easy path to widespread amnesty and generous allotments of guest worker visas. Elsewhere, he admits that the Mexican Consular Identification Card he helped issue to Mexicans living in the United States — a document that made it easier for illegal immigrants to open bank accounts and get drivers’ licenses — was indeed meant to be “an instrument of backdoor amnesty.” Unfortunately, Castañeda is rarely this frank about his public role or his agenda, which undermines the authority of his nimble account of the recent stalemate on immigration. The usefulness of this book as a reference is also limited by its haphazard organization and lack of any chapter titles or section headings. But Castañeda does compress a great deal of history and policy into 200 pages, and he has a lot to say about what is politically feasible in Mexico if a bilateral solution is desired. Those who side with him in hoping that the United States will “adapt legality to reality, instead of the other way around,” will find a welcome picture of how that future might be achieved.

Blake Wilson produces the Books section for The New York Times on the Web.

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