The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (review)

that the people currently living on the earth came from a remarkably small population, probably because at some point in the past everybody else was wiped out. These are among the more sobering issues that Bill Bryson discusses in A Short History of Nearly Everything , a book with something ofa dual personality. It begins as a cheerful miscellany of the history of science, starting with the ancients and touching on major figures and fields during succeeding centuries. The author approaches his subjects through the personalities of the scientists. Occasionally , he seems overly concerned to demonstrate, as if to a roomful of bored high school students, that all these people were really weird and interesting. Still, it is amusing to read about such characters as the paranoid genius Isaac Newton, author of the Principia, the most important document in the history of science. Newton was known to do such things as get halfway out of bed and forget to actually stand up. He figured out the basic laws ofphysics with apparently little effort, then spent most of his time fruitlessly puzzling over how to turn heavy metals into gold. The author also depicts many of the lesser-known characters from science , such as the Swede Karl Scheele, who was smart enough to discover eight elements but at the same time dumb enough to taste everything he discovered or had in his lab, including hydrocyanic acid. He was found at forty-three with a stunned look on his face, dead, surroundedbyan array of items, any of which could have killed him. From the 19th century we hear about Dr. Gideon Mantell, dinosaur discoverer, and his nemesis, the odious Richard Owen, the only man the gentle Darwin was said to hate. Owen tried to gain credit for the discovery ofdinosaurs by taking advantage of Mantell's weakened state after he fell from his carriage and was dragged through the streets in London—an accident that left him a near invalid. When the poor doctor died, Owen took his broken spine as one of the biological curiosities in the museum that he established, London 's Natural History Museum. Bryson focuses on the most visible scientific fields through the centuries. For example, he describes important figures in elementary chemistry in the 18th century; geology and paleontology in the 19th; and astronomy, biology, tectonics and atomic science in the 20th. The book's split personality becomes obvious in these later chapters, about subjects that at times plunge the author into gloom. Still, this is a rewarding book, especially for the reader who enjoys "facts" and history—with some thoroughly entertaining gossip mixed in. (SM) The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie FSG, 2003, 554 pp., $27 How does one write about a literary movement that never really was? In Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own, the answer seems to be: find four contemporary writers with a shared faith, describe their lives in clear, simple prose and let their stories offer whatever connections may arise. It's a risky strategy, especially when three of the four writers—Thomas Merton, 178 · The Missouri Review Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy—spent their lives in near seclusion and, with the exception of a brief visit between Merton and Percy, never met. The fourth, Dorothy Day, founded the Catholic Worker movement and devoted much of her literary life to publishing a political newspaper and doing social work. By these tokens, Elie's project should be a disaster. The threat of ruin that hangs over the opening pages quickly dissipates , though, as Elie introduces the four writers in terms of a shared pilgrimage , a thematic link that neatly serves the rest of the book: "Already, they saw themselves as representative figures whose concerns were characteristically modern; and already, they were sharpening their skills as writers—trying to describe religious experience, to imagine it, to convey it to the reader as believable, exciting, profound," he writes. Merton's pilgrimage, famously described in his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, began in his twenties, when he converted to Catholicism, eventually becoming a Trappist monk. The irony of "celebrity " that would attend his...