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212Fourth Genre enemy outpost in Northern Italy, is an account not so much of the battle itselfbut ofthe struggle to uncover reliable memories among the images that surface in the retelling. "From the Opaque" is an abstract yet lyrical exploration of the motives behind his writing, his particular way of seeing the world. "La PoubeUe Agréée" is an unfinished meditation on taking out the garbage while he lived in Paris. The title piece retraces his father's path to his farm in San Giovanni and seems to uncover his own motives in writing the piece as he writes it. Calvino's memory pieces chaUenge our honesty about our memories and the ways we determine which memories are true. Carol Spindel These three books ofcreative nonfiction are essays drawn out to book length, a genre we don't seem to have a name for. I think of each as an inquiry: the writer asks a question and then answers it by meandering through history, traveüng to places, and paying close attention to assumptions, both within and without. These books provide no neat answers, but they certainly make the asking interesting. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life ofWar, by Susan Griffin. Anchor Books, 1993. 363 pages, paper, $15.95. Susan Griffin, poet, feminist, and original thinker, asks herself why human beings make war. In reply, she posits that denial of the truth, which creates schisms in families, also divides larger groups of people. Her exploration of this idea is both urgent and meandering. We follow her to Oak Ridge as the atomic bomb is developed, inside a cell as it divides, to Hiroshima, and to Dachau. We come to know Enrico Fermi and Heinrich Himmler as children. She ponders denial and secrets in her own family as she shows us the wartime drawings of the grief-stricken mother, Kaethe KoUwitz and of Charlotte Salomon, who died in the camps before her chfld was born. Feminist and postmodern academics theorize about new ways of writing history, but Griffin simply does it, eloquently traveling the fault line where inner experiences meet the outer world. Book Reviews213 Bad Land: An American Romance, by Jonathan Raban. Vintage, 1997. 363 pages, paper, $14.00. Raban, known as a travel writer who is drawn to the sea, runs aground in eastern Montana in this book. In this dry, desolate landscape, he finds ruined homesteads and abandoned ranches. What happened to the people? Why did they come to this dry land and where did they go? Rabans inquiry weaves together excerpts from an unpublished memoir, visits to the place, pamphlets put out by the railroads to lure settlers, and theories from the homesteading era about scientific agriculture. These theories actuaUy promised the new farmers that more people tflling the soil would make more rain faU. Raban thinks like a geographer, carefuUy piecing together the relationship between these people and this land in the early part of the twentieth century. The bits and pieces are beautifuUy woven together with sympathy for both the people and the place. Prayingfor Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction, by Melissa Fay Greene. Fawcett Books, 1992. 335 pages, paper, $11.00. Melissa Gay Greene asks the question, what was it like when civil rights arrived in a smaU out-of-the-way county in Georgia? We tend to associate the civil rights movement with dramatic moments and sudden change. But the reality came later and more gradually in places like Mcintosh County, Georgia, a coastal backwater that is the private fiefdom ofa domineering Uttle white sheriff. Her book, written in lyrical, evocative prose, foUows one courageous black man who ran for public office in the 1970s. Praying for Sheetrock is history written in a novelistic style. It flirts with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, particularly in several places where Greene seems to enter other people's minds. And unlike much contemporary creative nonfiction, its author is not present as a character. These qualities make for interesting classroom discussion. Penelope Scambly Schott From a World Apart: A Little Girl in the Concentration Camps, by Francine Christophe, translated by Christine Burls. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 179 pages, paper, $15.00. ...

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