Page 31 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 2 Winter 2013

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and no way for any Confederate army to
march up it.”
The Right-Hand Shore begins in 1920,
with the opportunistic and feckless Edward
Mason calling on his distant relative,
Miss Mary Bayly, at The Retreat, a living
history where “what happens on the land
is never past.” Mary would like to name
an heir to The Retreat, preferably the
closest direct descendent of the estate’s
founder, on the condition the heir in
question is Catholic. This is no obstacle
for Edward, who asks, “Really, we’re all
Catholics, aren’t we?”
Over the course of his visit, Edward
hears the stories of the land and its
inhabitants, a rich and complex tapes-
try of race, class, and family that is both
intimately local and universal. He learns
of Miss Mary’s grandfather, who pre-
emptively sold all of his slaves rather
than lose them to Emancipation; of Mary’s
father and his ambitious but disastrous
vision of converting the land to a peach
orchard; and of Mary’s own efforts to
restore the fortunes of The Retreat.
Unlike Edward, however, Tilghman
doesn’t flinch in the face of The Retreat
and its history, intrepidly tapping the
dark injustices and secrets that riddle
the revered property and, more broadly,
the United States.
Double Agent
by Michelle Chan
Brown ’99
Kore Press, 80 pages, $14
Reviewed by Heid
Erdrich ’82
The title of Double Agent suggests a spy
thriller or tell-all, but instead these are
hybrid poems of the real and surreal
that move within the world of embassies,
diplomats, and those who accompany
and guard them. Set between the late
1970s and 1980s as well as the near-
present, the poems are decidedly non-
linear. Like an agent, these poems are
on the prowl, and often the subject of
the search is the father – but not always
an actual father – and not the icon we
might expect, but a more complicated
patrimony of language, image, country,
and the self as projected across time and
Brooklyn’s Bush-
wick and East
Williamsburgh
Communities
Brian Merlis and
Riccardo Gomes ’75
Based on the photographic and mem-
orabilia collection of Brian Merlis, this
book contains more than 500 black-
and-white images. The history of Bush-
wick, from the early Dutch settlement to
a German beer-brewing capital, through
its demise and rebirth, is covered in detail.
The infrastructure that defined the neigh-
borhood is documented in this limited-
edition work, which covers in detail an area
often ignored by other books devoted to
New York City or Brooklyn.
Blood Algebra
John Cooper Lovejoy ’83
Blood Algebra is two
stories in one: A fiery and
quixotic American physi-
cian who goes to Guatemala
to help the underserved, but
brings about unintended consequences
when she falls for the most unlikely of men,
and a Guatemalan military hero trained
by the CIA, whose greatest qualities bring
about his spectacular downfall, and yet
lead to his rebirth and his greatest, most
ruthless success. Both stories beget the
question: What are any of us capable of, if
pushed beyond our limits by the extremes
of war or love?
On the Shelf . . . The Oracle of Hollywood
Boulevard: Poems
Dana Goodyear ’94
The frank, raw lyrics of
Dana Goodyear’s second
collection draw on the
scenery of Los Angeles –
the teenagers, vagrants, pornographers
– and the beautiful decay that serves as
an insistent reminder to them all. The
poems are unsparing but tender, candid
but sly, and open to the force of nature
on an individual human life.
The 4-Hour Chef
Timothy Ferriss ’95
What if you could be-
come world-class in any-
thing in six months or less?
The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just
a cookbook; it’s a choose-
your-own-adventure guide to the world
of rapid learning. Ferriss takes you from
Manhattan to Okinawa, and from Silicon
Valley to Calcutta, unearthing the secrets
of the world’s fastest learners and great-
est chefs. Ferriss uses cooking to explain
“meta-learning,” a step-by-step process
that can be used to master anything,
whether searing steak or shooting three-
pointers in basketball. That is the real
“recipe” of The 4-Hour Chef. You’ll train
inside the kitchen for everything outside
the kitchen. Featuring tips and tricks
from chess prodigies, world-renowned
chefs, pro athletes, master sommeliers,
supermodels, and everyone in between,
this “cookbook for people who don’t
buy cookbooks” is a guide to mastering
cooking and life.
continents. The perspective, like that of
a spy on two sides, is often dual or even
plural as in “Memorandum”:
“The natives have absconded/with the
hardware and the silk. Please send/ a
man who fixes things. Please send towels.
/These curtains are pretty and incompe-
tent. / They can’t brush off the shouting
in the streets./Our recommendations
were soft as cashmere./We wrote it, loud
and clear. Don’t visit./Didn’t you hear us?
Come quickly. Bring power.”
Winner of the Kore Press First Book
Award for 2011, Michelle Chan Brown’s
collection is praised in terms of its
music, strangeness, and originality.
Sound is everything in these poems,
and I found myself longing to hear them
read aloud. Lines such as these from
“Open House,” a poem of social critique,
seem meant for performance: “Thirteen
tulips heighten the bouquet’s tension.
Bouffants float in the atmosphere like
funeral chrysanthemums.”
Although the setting is often refined
– elegant dinner dates and parties, a
chauffeured ride, shopping for high-
end fashion, a reference to the opera –
all these lovely things are made unsafe
with deft little turns of lines so that
poems lush as oysters bite us with a
grit we come to savor.