Fall For Heroes
It’s the perfect season to warm up and be inspired by some real, imagined, and sometimes unexpected, heroes in these new reads.
“Bewilderment” By Richard Powers
After writing the 2019 Pulitzer-winning, “The Overstory”, Richard Powers returns with “Bewilderment” another intelligent and heady eco-novel. Released last month, it has just been short-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize.
This is a poetic story of a fierce relationship between a father and son both grieving the tragic loss of their wife and mother. The father is an astrobiologist who searches for proof of life on distant planets, with a son, “on the spectrum,” who he refuses to medicate. He chooses instead to experiment with a neurofeedback treatment. The results, both the reader and story characters recognize, have parallels to the short story “Flowers To Algernon”.
Powers asks us to consider the fate of the planet earth, space, and even our country’s own real-world divisive politics of today. But at its core, this is a heart wrenching and beautiful story of a father desperately protecting his young son. Heroes may not always achieve their goals, but it’s the trying that makes them truly heroic.
“Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir
Sci-fi is not my usual fiction choice but having enjoyed the movie version of Andy Weir’s “The Martian”, I was open to reading his latest novel, “Project Hail Mary.”
The story begins as Ryland Grace, a middle-school teacher turned astronaut awakens from a coma, unaware that he is the sole-survivor of a last-chance space mission to save humanity and earth.
Once again Weir takes us on an inspiring journey of interstellar survival with an engaging mix of humor, science-nerd talk, and acquaints us with an endearing reluctant hero, drafted by circumstances that force him to rise to the challenge.
Fans of Weir’s first book will certainly appreciate this one. It reads like a movie, and has already been optioned by Ryan Gosling to play the lead. (Of course, knowing this, I couldn’t help visualizing Gosling in this role wisecracking with what is sure to be a memorable non-human co-star.)
When astronaut Grace is asked about the price of heroism and “Why are we willing to die for our people?” he responds, “A self-sacrifice instinct makes the species as a whole more likely to continue.” The very definition of heroism.
“Falling” By T.J. Newman
Prior to its release, a 14 major-studios bidding war for this debut novel is not surprising when you read this white-knuckle, thriller in the sky. But the genesis of the book, “Falling” by T.J. Newman, was a long shot. The former flight attendant, turned novelist, had written over 30 drafts, with the manuscript rejected by 41 literary agents, before it was finally accepted.
These days, air travel is already steeped in extreme stress. But imagine that right before your flight, your pilot’s family was kidnapped, and for them to live, he must crash your plane and kill everyone aboard. This is the book’s premise.
As the story unfolds, there are plenty of adrenalin-inducing action and charismatic characters to root for. But perhaps what struck me most is that the diverse heroes we are cheering for are everyday people — airline personnel, pilot, crew, air traffic controllers — all with a sense of pride, dedication, and purpose that go way beyond serving drinks and snacks.
“The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice” by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
In a lovely waterfront garden on Nantucket Island, drinking rosé at an elegant luncheon this past summer, I learned about some truly unexpected heroes. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of “The Daughters of Kobani” came to the Nantucket Film Festival to speak about an all-female militia who fought against ISIS. The dichotomy of where I was and what I was hearing was not lost on me.
It took Lemmon, a former correspondent turned journalist and author, three years to write the story of Kurdish women who came together to lead the battle to stop the Islamic state in their town in 2014. Dedicated to telling what happened, she has written three books, two are being made into films — one produced by Reese Witherspoon, and this one by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
In a society where girls are prohibited from going to school, an improbable group of women stepped into the war because they felt they had to. One young solider said, “ You can’t wait for someone else because there are no others to do this — only us.” Inspired to act, they became empowered to rewrite the rules of their society.
To U.S. Special Operations leaders these women were “warriors” who had proven that they were the area’s best shot against ISIS in Syria — a ground force strong enough to hold and advance terrain.
Lemmon explained, “They were fighting for what women everywhere, including here, in the United States want…to go to school and have an opportunity to forge their own futures.” This reminded me that my daughter said the exact same thing to me when she returned from volunteering in a Syrian refugee camp in northern Greece in 2016. She helped set up classrooms to teach children — an experience that also profoundly changed her.
These are real life heroes, and as Lemmon says, “with the courage of a David-versus- Goliath-story, except that, here David is a woman.”
