The Online Photographer

["Sunday Support Group" is a weekly article in support of projects, aspirations, resolutions, self-help and self-reform. Although not always germane to photography, SSG was inspired by the insight that photographers tend to be happier if they have a project and/or a purpose.]

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We all have those touchstone books—the ones that were important experiences for us and became part of the story of our lives. Today I'd like I to recommend a book that was important to me, and that I just found out is "still good" you might say.

I'm an alcoholic—sober 29 years, one month, and ten days, plus part of today. The book I want to recommend, Under the Influence by James Milam and Katherine Ketchum, was part of the "welcome package" inpatients received on arriving to the rehab center where I first got sober.

I wouldn't normally recommend a nonfiction book on a scientific topic that was published way back in 1981. But I spoke on the phone the other day to Beth Kane-Davidson (right). Although neither of us remembers the other, she was working at Suburban Hospital's Addiction Treatment Center when I was there ("so our paths crossed," she said). She is now its Director. And she endorsed Under the Influence. I asked whether things haven't changed since 1990, and she said, "the cellular science hasn't changed." We had a nice conversation—she was happy to speak to a successful "alum." The book helped change my life at the time, so I was happy to learn that it's still well regarded by an expert in the field. Now I'm reading it again...for the third time, but the first in more than a quarter-century.

There's a fascinating short section about myths and realities at the beginning of the book that I wish I could quote in its entirety. (To do so would be a copyright violation.) Here are a few as a sampling:

MYTH: Alcohol is predominantly a sedative or depressant drug.

REALITY: Alcohol’s pharmacological effects change with the amount drunk. In small quantities, alcohol is a stimulant. In large quantities, alcohol acts as a sedative. In all amounts, however, alcohol provides a rich and potent source of calories and energy.

MYTH: Alcohol is an addictive drug, and anyone who drinks long and hard enough will become addicted.

REALITY: Alcohol is a selectively addictive drug; it is addictive for only a minority of its users, namely, alcoholics. Most people can drink occasionally, daily, even heavily, without becoming addicted to alcohol. Others (alcoholics) will become addicted no matter how much they drink.

MYTH: All sorts of social problems—marriage problems, a death in the family, job stress—may cause alcoholism.

REALITY: As with psychological and emotional problems, alcoholics experience all the social pressures everyone else does, but their ability to cope is undermined by the disease and the problems get worse.

MYTH: If people would only drink responsibly, they would not become alcoholics.

REALITY: Many responsible drinkers become alcoholics. Then, because it is the nature of the disease (not the person), they begin to drink irresponsibly.

MYTH: An alcoholic has to want help to be helped.

REALITY: Most drinking alcoholics do not want to be helped. They are sick, unable to think rationally, and incapable of giving up alcohol by themselves. Most recovered alcoholics were forced into treatment against their will. Self-motivation usually occurs during treatment, not before.

MYTH: Some alcoholics can learn to drink normally and can continue to drink with no ill effects as long as they limit the amount.

REALITY: Alcoholics can never safely return to drinking because drinking in any amount will sooner or later reactivate their addiction.

MYTH: When the alcoholic is drinking, he reveals his true personality.

REALITY: Alcohol’s effect on the brain causes severe psychological and emotional distortions of the normal personality. Sobriety reveals the alcoholic’s true personality.

That's skirting the upper limits of what's allowable to quote without permission, but there are more.

The book is chock-full of insights and information that are absolutely fascinating. Did you know, for example...

• That alcohol is the only drug that is also a food...but that all alcoholics are malnourished no matter what they eat? (Because active alcoholism interferes with the body's ability to absorb nutrients.)
• That alcohol is one of very few substances which can penetrate the brain's primary defense in the body, the blood-brain barrier?
• That alcohol's very first victim is the organism that creates it? (Yeast, a microscopic fungus, which voraciously converts sugar to alcohol in the fermentation process, is itself killed off when the alcohol concentration reaches about 14%, which is why that's the upper limit for the alcoholic content of naturally fermented, i.e. non-distilled, beverages such as wine.)
• That alcohol's most surprisingly quality is its ability to relieve the very distress it creates? (It's the cure for a hangover and it offers relief from the harrowing symptoms of withdrawal.)
  
• That alcohol is a very poor painkiller, because palliative effects are only evident when the dosage is dangerously close to being lethal? (So much for all those movies where a wild west desperado is given whiskey before having a bullet dug out of his side or a Civil War soldier is having his leg sawn off—if the movie is realistic, the patient will still cry out in pain. The whiskey wasn't helping.)

It's a very readable book despite a few stretches that will be tough for the less scientifically literate. Those don't go on too long, and you can still get the gist, even if you don't come to it knowing things like what MEOS stands for (the microsomal ethanol oxidizing system, if you're curious). The whole book doesn't go on too long either—256 pages, short and sweet and to the point.

One of the book's priorities is to clearly distinguish alcoholism from problem drinking. So if you happen to be curious about that—either in your own case or on behalf of someone else—then it could be what you need to answer that question.

Alcoholism is a subject worth learning about. It's a very dangerous disease. It's especially dangerous for alcoholics, but for many others too. First of all, the majority of alcoholics either die of the disease or die drinking, an average of 11 years earlier than they would have died otherwise—statistically speaking. But you don't have to be an alcoholic to die of drinking. Many problem drinkers and recreational drinkers who are not alcoholic die of acute alcohol poisoning—like the two perfectly healthy young friends who bet each other one night in a bar to see who could down a fifth of vodka the fastest. Both chugged their bottles. Both passed out—but unconsciousness didn't stop the alcohol from continuing to pass from their stomachs and intestines into their bloodstreams, and their blood alcohol levels continued to rise. Both were dead within hours.

It's pretty amazing that in our booze- and wine- and beer-soaked culture, most young people don't even know that it's possible to die pretty much on the spot from merely drinking too much too fast. (Tell your kids.) That's undoubtedly one of the reasons why six people die of acute alcohol poisoning every day in the U.S., according to current data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One hundred percent of those deaths are needless and pointless and a waste.

It should be obvious to most intelligent people that many non-alcoholic people get drunk and die from accidents of all sorts, too. Automobile accidents are only the main and best-known of these. The leading cause of deaths at college fraternity houses is falling out of windows or falling off roofs, for example. How often do you think a stone cold sober 20-year-old falls out of a window?

It's a disease that kills non-drinkers, even, because alcoholics impaired by drunkenness sometimes kill other people—most often with a motorized vehicle of some sort weaponized by an alcohol-addled operator. Even sometimes when they're in "blackouts," periods of time they'll have no memory of later.

Were so many of these deaths not masked by the descriptions of their more immediate causes—from liver failure to suicide to falling out of windows to car wrecks—alcoholism and long- and short-term alcohol consumption would rank much higher than it does among all causes of death in the U.S. It might even be first.

If alcohol affects you, your family, or someone you know—or if you're just interested in coming up to speed on the subject—read Under the Influence. It's the kind of book I like: a clear discussion of a cloudy topic.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

c.d.embrey: "Very interesting. I'm not addictive. If I want to quit, I just quit—worked with cigarettes and beer. Never did drugs or had GAS. My son is NFL linebacker big. If it wasn't for friends he'd have died from acute alcohol poisoning. He thought that with his body mass he'd be OK chugging...wrong! Thanks for posting this!"'

Lynn: "Alcohol is also a major contributor to drowning deaths. It's a significant problem in Australia where waterways and backyard pools are the ideal place to hold a party in the warmer months. Drinking alcohol and going for a swim in the ocean to celebrate or sober up often has tragic consequences. Alcohol and water don't mix! It impairs judgement about when and where it's safe to swim or when to get out of the water. It can accelerate hypothermia. Young people are particularly vulnerable—the Royal Life Saving Society of Australia says alcohol contributes to at least 41 percent of drownings in the 15–29 years age group, compared to 20 percent of all adult drowning deaths.

"I've always liked wine with meals, but after a family member almost died from alcohol poisoning I gave up in support. That was at the beginning of 2018. I've never regretted it, or felt better."

KeithB: "Re 'Most drinking alcoholics do not want to be helped. They are sick, unable to think rationally, and incapable of giving up alcohol by themselves.' When a person close to me was acutely mentally ill, I was amazed at how the illness worked to prevent the sufferer from recognizing the fact that they were ill."

adamct: "While I cannot claim that the European model is perfect, I do think that there is something deeply flawed about how many young people encounter alcohol in this country. Many (though certainly not all, given that not everyone goes to college and many students begin drinking in high school) young people first encounter significant quantities of alcohol in college, specifically as freshmen. Think about what kind of an environment that is:

• Far away from family and trusted friends
• Absence of responsible supervision
• Peer pressure to fit in and be accepted
• Illegal to drink at that age

"The last point has significant consequences, in terms of (i) legal jeopardy (fake IDs, etc.), (ii) how and where people drink (in hiding), (iii) reluctance to call authorities or for help when someone drinks too much (see the case of the fraternity that waited too long to call an ambulance after a pledge had clearly consumed a life-threatening amount of alcohol), and (iv) in terms of what students wind up drinking. What is the cheapest form of alcohol, and also the easiest to conceal? Hard alcohol. Per unit of alcohol, beer and wine are both more expensive, and harder to hide (try walking back to your dorm with a case of beer without people noticing). And unfortunately, students (and many adults, for that matter) are ill-prepared for how quickly hard alcohol can become dangerous, especially given that your blood alcohol level can continue to rise after you have stopped 'drinking.' (Which shouldn't be read to imply that drinking beer and wine are safe. They're not.)

"I believe all of this means that we introduce young people to alcohol under the absolute most dangerous circumstances possible. I hesitate to recommend introducing students to alcohol earlier, while they are still at home, although it is at least worth considering. Another option would be to permit drinking at official college 'bars,' where students could be monitored and consumption could be limited (or at least the forms of alcohol offered could be restricted). None of that would prevent alcoholism or abuse, but it might help at least some students."

Dave Sailer: "Left out: Alcohol is also a type 1 (or group 1) carcinogen. I.e., it has been proven to cause cancer in humans."

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays. Sorry this took so long to complete! While writing it I went down rabbit-holes as never before. Kind of amazed I made it back. —Ed.]

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Apropos the recent "Overtourism" post, here are some smashingly good books that will allow you to go on great adventures without leaving the warmth of your own cozy hearth:

Joe Simpson, Touching the Void (2004). In some ways I'm sorry this was made into a movie, because it will spoil for innumerable souls the great pleasure of reading the book with no idea of the outcome. Read that way, it was one of the best "thrillers" I've ever come across in either fiction or nonfiction. If ever the existential trap of being in a body on Earth was boiled down to a purer essence than that faced by the protagonist at the suspended peak of the action in this book, I can't conceive of it—it has the heightened symbolic perfection of an invented fairy tale. The friend must make his Hobson's choice; the fallen man faces his terrifying dilemma. I've never felt the predicament of another human being more vividly from mere words on paper. Unless you've had the story spoiled for you by the film, set aside some time for this short little thriller. It's terrific.

Gary Kinder, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea: The History and Discovery of the World's Richest Shipwreck (1998). If you have a technical and logical cast of mind and love gear and science—and nonfiction—forget chests of pirate gold buried on the beaches of remote Caribbean islands; here's the story for you. When the S.S. Central America, a side-wheel steamer returning from the California gold fields laden with humans and tons of gold, went down in a maelstrom in 1875, it came to rest under miles of water, location unknown, where it was long believed to be unrecoverable. That was until a brilliant and determined inventor-explorer set his sights on the impossible. The real story is better than any romantic assumptions about "lucky finds." The book, which took Kinder nearly ten years to write, was a bestseller when it came out in 1998.

...And it's told from the perspective of no later than 1998. From there, the story went on. Remember the Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy? The S.S. Central America treasure has since triggered that sort of trouble and skullduggery—the treasure-hunter absconded with the dough and became a fugitive. And I have to say, when I read Ship of Gold, I wondered about what was to come. What has happened since 1998 probably deserves another book, probably written by someone else. Still, the story this book tells is a great one. Gary Kinder, who lives in Seattle, now teaches writing seminars to lawyers across the U.S.

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff. Contrary to the impression imparted by the news, recent research suggests that the world is getting progressively less violent—and part of the reason might be that people have been reading novels for the last several hundred years. Novels allow us to climb inside other peoples' heads and sympathize with their experience, which, the theory goes, affects our thinking by increasing our sympathy and compassion for those outside our own type and our own tribe. Though not novels, armchair adventure books can be counted as a way to go places you'll never go and understand the world in ways you never could from firsthand experience.

This is the one book on this list I haven't read. But how can a list touting books about going on great adventures from "the warmth of your own cozy hearth" not include "the final frontier"—what used to be called "outer space"? 'Twould seem like an omission. Even if you're an inveterate traveler, you'll never go where the people in this book have gone.

You'll have to tell me whether you think Tom Wolfe's celebrated book deserves to be on this list. I've been meaning to read it for years, but in the queue of all the books I have a-waiting it never quite seems to make it all the way to the top.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild (2013). Some writers have the knack of getting you to read fast and effortlessly, like water flows downhill. This book "reads itself," as the saying goes. Here's the blurb, because I can't describe it better: "At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her." Read the sample; a luminous book. Suspend critical judgement and go get into Cheryl Strayed's head for a while. You won't regret going along on the trip.

Mark Twain, the first quarter of Roughing It (1872), the part about the stagecoach journey, and the first section of Life on the Mississippi (1883) in which he recounts his early training as a steamboat pilot. There are a lot of things we no longer know about Twain now, now that he's no longer put forward as the Great American Novelist, one of which is that, despite earning several fortunes, he never escaped money worries. It kept him scribbling away at a manic pace, ever the entertainer, always on the hustle. Consequently there's a junky, kitchen-sink quality to some of his books, both early and late, where he seems to lose his way or try too hard or where he gets too wrapped up in his own schtick. I wasn't nearly as charmed by the later sections of Roughing It, which get, well, rough—they lose the quality of first-rate travel writing which the stagecoach section has in abundance—and although some people like the later sections of Life on the Mississippi, the part written about his later-life journey from St. Louis to New Orleans seems perilously close to padding to me, and doesn't have nearly the interest of his memories of his early days on the river, when life was new and the riverboat was king. Despite these irregularities, Twain at his best is so good that the good bits are worth winnowing out from the fluff and junk and the parts done for money.

Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries. Based literally on diary entries, and published in 2003. There are three books I'd recommend to motorcycling existentialists: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Oliver Sachs' autobiography On the Move (there's very little in that book about motorcycles, but what there is sticks in my mind), and this. It's a slight book (175 pages), obviously not by a professional writer, and not the most famous or best "on the road" book. That would have to be, well, On the Road. But there's something immediate and authentic about Che Guevara's little memoir that both makes his outsized legend human-sized again and that speaks immediately to the impulsive urge to travel and experience the world that is so characteristic of wild youth. You can skip this if you've grayed or have anything reflexive against Cuban revolutionaries. If you're young, check it out. The book is alive in a way that some better books aren't.

William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways (1982). I bought this book because I wandered into a bookstore on Dupont Circle in DC to look at records. A crowd had gathered. They were listening raptly to a small, soft-spoken man with old-fashioned country-style clothing and wire-rimmed eyeglasses with thick lenses. His name was Bill. As I recall, his wife had left him, and he had lost his job as a teacher, so, with time on his hands and little left to lose, he set aside his European last name, Trogdon, and started using his father's Osage Indian name, Heat-Moon. He, as his father's youngest, was called Least. He constructed a small living enclosure on the back of his old pickup truck [Note: see correction in the Featured Comments] and set out to find something to write a book about. His idea was to stay off the superhighways and stick to the secondary roads, typically colored blue in the old Rand-McNally Road Atlases—and try to find what was left of the old United States. That was in 1978. He traveled 13 thousand miles in three months, and the book spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has never been out of print.

I got to talk to him for a quarter of an hour, and he inscribed and signed the copy of the first edition I bought for the purpose—alas, long lost now. It wasn't in good condition anyway, because I read it twice and loaned it out to a number of friends too. Maybe one of them has it still. This book will be better for older, knowledgeable folks who find contemplation agreeable.

Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996). I identified with this one because the doomed protagonist, Chris McCandless, was more or less of my generation and his father Walt worked with my dad at NASA. It's a strange and terrible story that, despite the author's attempt to provide answers, leaves many questions unanswered. Former Outside magazine writer turned best-selling book author Jon Krakauer uses the tale in part to explore what drives young men to climb mountains and seek adventure; as a set-piece, the pages about the author's harrowing quest to sit astride the summit of the Devil's Thumb, and how it did or did not change his life (I'm not about to give that away), is worth the price of the book in my opinion. There are ancillary materials available now, including a video by his siblings attesting to their bad home life growing up.

Krakauer's most famous book, of course, is Into Thin Air, his controversial but compelling first-person account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. As popular as it was, that book ends in desolation and left me with a bad feeling in my soul that lingered for a month. (On the other hand, it is surely the seminal literary work of the age of overtourism—we've all seen the bizarre spectacles that have taken place at Everest since then.)

Eric Newby, What the Traveler Saw (1989). There's a uniform edition available from HarperCollins UK of all of Eric Newby's books (here's the UK link to the author page), and I can see why—he's an affable tourguide and excellent company. It's very tempting to collect all of these. I haven't regretted any of the time I've spent with him. But while few of these titles have any direct connection to photography, I'm going to choose What the Traveler Saw because it is overtly a recollection of Newby's travel photography. Many of the pictures in the book were taken with a plain-Jane Pentax and a 50mm lens, but I enjoyed the pictures that go along with the writing a lot—Newby is one of my favorite non-photographer photographers. You can find the hardcover used, which would be the way to go with this one.

N.C. Wyeth illustration from Mutiny on the Bounty

Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, The Bounty Trilogy. For a seagoing adventure I might have chosen the newer In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick, which won the 2001 National Book Award and was made into a movie by director Ron Howard in 2015. That one is the real-life story that caused a public sensation when it happened and inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. Philbrick's book is a modern retelling of the true story of the whaling ship Essex, which was rammed, stoved-in and sunk by an enraged sperm whale, and the subsequent fate of the crew in the whaleboats (used as lifeboats), who ended up so much in extremis that no fewer than seven crew members were cannibalized by their shipmates. Two of the survivors wrote first-person accounts; one went mad.

But when I ask myself which I would rather have read if I could read only one of the two, it's no contest: the greater sea story (possible the greatest, unless you count The Odyssey of Homer, available in a new translation), and one of history's great tales, is the classic Bounty Trilogy from the nineteen-thirties. The Trilogy, first issued as such in 1936, comprises the original three books in one volume: Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), about the voyage of the HMS Bounty and the daring mutiny; Men Against the Sea (1933), the tale of Bligh's epic and unlikely return to England; and Pitcairn's Island (1934), the story of the mutineers seeking escape from the wrath of the Crown. (Descendants of the Bounty mutineers still populate Pitcairn.) It is beautifully written, fascinating in terms of human nature, a multifaceted story, and gripping reading.

There are a number of editions. Maybe you can land one with N.C. Wyeth's illustrations. There's a serviceable book club edition published by Grossett & Dunlap. You might poke around in eBay Books or Abebooks and see what you can find. Note that books titled "Mutiny on the Bounty" might just contain the first book rather than all three.

There have been three movie versions. The original in 1935 featured Charles Laughton's famous turn as Captain Bligh (worth seeing) and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. A remake in 1962 stars Trevor Howard as Bligh and Marlon Brando, then perhaps the most famous movie star in the world, as Christian. Here, the backstory is more interesting than the film—it was the start of Brando's reputation for being difficult, and kicked off what the actor later called "my f--k you years." (A Saturday Evening Post article about the production was titled "Six million dollars down the drain: the mutiny of Marlon Brando.") Not counting a made-for-TV version, the final attempt came in 1984 and was called simply The Bounty. A title as self-contained and iconic as "Mutiny on the Bounty" needs to be shortened? But that was the fashion with movie titles in the '80s, and this was possibly that fashion's dumbest result—ridiculed at the time as sounding like a roll of paper towels. It's like making a movie version of The Grapes of Wrath and calling it "The Grapes." Anyway, that one, my least favorite of the three, featured Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson (whom I've personally never cared for as a human) in the lead roles.

The movies are all enjoyable but all flawed in one way or another. As with Jane Eyre, a definitive movie version remains to be made. The books are better.

Old, but still not to be missed. The Bounty Trilogy has fired the imaginations of generations of readers.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

[Note: In deciding which comment to "feature" I wanted to include a few reader recommendations, but I can't include them all. Please don't assume that I think the recommendations I "featured" are any better or worse than other recommendations in the regular Comments Section. Not the case. —MJ]

Featured Comments from:

Burt Porter: "My top choice is Alf Lansing's account of the Shackleton expedition, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. It was published in 1959 and is still in print. A very readable account of one of the great adventures. And since this is a photo blog, after all, check out the glass plate prints from the expedition. They are glorious."

Mike replies: The photographer was Frank Hurley, whose accomplishments were extraordinary.

Marco: "On the same thread of Into The Wild and mentioned in this book, I liked also Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer, by David Roberts. A painter, not a photographer, but he met Dorothea Lange and had a portrait made by her."

Steve Rosenblum: "I think Krakauer is a very talented author. However, Into The Wild just made me angry. I don't think there is anything particularly romantic about throwing your life away due to stupidity. I have spent a lot of time in wild places. You must enter them well prepared and respectful of the power and unpredictability of nature. The protagonist seemed like an earnest enough young man, but hiking into the Alaskan wilderness unprepared with only a bag of rice and no real survival skills is just suicidal. Perhaps that was his intent, but to me it just looks like a wasted life."

Mark Roberts: "Man, I'd have been upset if you'd left out Eric Newby.  ;-)  My favourite of his is A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (which has what may be the best, non-cliché travel book ending ever) but The Last Grain Race is pretty good, too."

Michael Bade: "If you like Newby, you might try The Last Grain Race. He shipped out on a square-rigged four-masted ship for the Australia run. He also took his father's Contax and photographed the voyage—the version I have included the photos he took during the voyage. His writing puts you in the scene and then the photos complete what's in the mind's eye—recommended!"

Mike replies: I don't know which editions of The Last Grain Race are illustrated and which aren't. Some of those photographs are included in What the Traveler Saw. The most complete collection is in a book called Windjammer: Pictures of Life Before the Mast in the Last Grain Race.

Clay Olmstead: "Excellent list! Here are three more, in no particular order: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann is a trip into the Amazon before it was being incinerated (and another good book made into a mediocre movie); Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen gives a compelling account of the risks and rewards of exploration in the 16th century; In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides tells the story of exploration for purely scientific purposes, when there was a common belief in a warm ocean at the North Pole (completely without any scientific data to back it up, much like global warming deniers today)."

Mark Sampson: "Eastern Approaches, by Fitzroy Maclean. A young British diplomat, he traveled throughout Central Asia in the 1930s, when it was closed to foreigners by the Soviet regime; and that's only the first part of an engaging, very well-written book. Some people have suggested that he was a model for Ian Fleming's James Bond—certainly it's plausible. The book is not well known in the USA, but it should be."

Popum: "Bravo, Nordhoff & Hall. I first read the trilogy 60+ years ago as a young teen...stuck with me like few books have. When I was being interviewed to become a Trustee of our local library, I was asked what book was my all-time favorite. You can guess the answer. It was a great conversation starter since no one on the interview committee had even heard of it. By the way, the librarian was not on the committee. P.S. Thanks to Nordhoff & Hall I ended up becoming the President of the Board of trustees."

Moose: "William Least Heat-Moon outfitted his (Ford Econoline) van with a bunk, a camping stove, a portable toilet.... It was John Steinbeck who used a custom made camper on the back of a truck for his travel across the US, as told in Travels with Charley. I reread it fairly recently, and must say that Blue Highways is much the better book. For Eric Newby, I also recommend Around the World in 80 Years. I find it difficult to imagine a better start to the introduction to an autobiography than 'To have reached the age of eighty years more or less unscathed is by no means une affaire mince, an insignificant matter, which is how a French friend of more or less the same age described it. How I contrived to reach sixty and then seventy without noticing it is still a mystery to me.' Copiously illustrated with photographs."

david stone: "Have you been stalking me? Most of those are on my favorite books list. I guess we're on the same page, so to speak."

Bill Tyler: "In the late 1800s, an old sea captain, Joshua Slocum, rebuilt a small wooden vessel from the keel up, and then sailed it solo around the world. His account of the voyage makes any modern sailing adventure seem tame by comparison. There were no radios to call for help, no GPS for navigation. He did not have funds for a chronometer, the necessary instrument for determining longitude. It’s an amazing story of seamanship and adventure, very readable, and full of the flavor of the times. I recommend it highly. Sailing Alone Around The World, by Joshua Slocum."

Mike adds: That book is out of copyright protection and in the public domain, so there are numerous cheap paperbacks. That means you have to be a little careful about what you're buying. For example, the end-of-chapter Summary in a so-called "Annotated" edition starts out like this: "Some people get bore while reading the novel . But when you started to fell the novel, you cant miss a single line from the novel." (All [sic].) This one looks well made, although I can't vouch for it. There's a large print version from Dover reprints. People who are proud of their bookshelves might want to seek one of the nice hardcover editions: the most famous is The Century Company's edition from around the turn of the 20th century; there's a trim and spruce little hardcover from Konëmann, and Shambhala even got into the act in the early 2000s. The nicest in my opinion is a fine press edition by Westvaco from 1969, which is beautifully designed and illustrated if you like that sort of bookmaking. Westvaco (West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company) was a paper manufacturer that subsidized an original fine press edition of a classic every Christmas for a number of years. That's the edition I have. It's rare but not particularly expensive.

The Westvaco edition. Illustration from Amazon.

 As with other old titles that have enjoyed sustained interest over many years, it can be fun to haunt Abebooks, eBay's Antiquarian & Collectible Books section, and used bookstores to see if you can find something interesting or unusual.

Gijs: "Thanks for the list of exciting books. I can also recommend two history books which are almost entirely adventure: The Arctic Grail and Klondike: the Last Gold Rush, both by Pierre Berton. There are events or experiences in both books which make John Krakauer's Into Thin Air read like a Sunday stroll in a park with a playground!"

Iain: "I recommend books by Wilfred Thesiger: 'I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.' from The Life of My Choice.

"His photographic archive of 38,000 images is held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, and is available online."

John Denniston: "If you enjoyed The Bounty Trilogy you would like Caroline Alexander’s update The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. Alexander researched admiralty records, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, plus private letters from the families of the mutineers, and found that not only was Bligh was one of the more benign naval commanders of the era but that the Christian and Heywood families did a public relations hatchet job on him to protect their upper class family reputations. Bligh, who was not from the upper class, had no friends in high places."

Mike replies: I own and have read the Caroline Alexander book. I generally like to "read around" books I'm reading—that is, read secondary books that augment or complement the main course. It's often wise to get two sides to every story. I also have a strange habit of pairing books: picking two books that are better read together than reading each alone. That's probably just an eccentricity.

Mark Sampson: "Okay, one more worthwhile obscurity, Horace Brock's Flying the Oceans. Brock was a navigator and later a pilot for Pan American Airways in the 1930s and '40s, the era of the flying-boat Clippers. They were the Space Shuttles of their time. Talking about navigating over the Pacific in 1937, he said 'the navigation math was not so difficult; it was just that you could never make a mistake.' Fascinating, and, naturally, long out of print."

Mike replies: The one to seek out there is the Stinehour Press edition from 1979.

raul v.: "Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts is the epitome of travel literature for me. A war hero and prolific adventurer, Paddy was greater than life and his literary talent shines in his books where he describes a world long gone—the Europe between the World Wars."

Mike replies: I've never read him (or heard of him prior to this, to be honest) but that must be a famous one. There's a Folio Society deluxe slipcased edition and it was reprinted in the NYRB Classics series.

Mani Sitaraman: "That's a excellent list of travel books, Mike, but the capsule synopses by you are even better! I'm pleased to say I've read most of them, but will seek out the ones I haven't.

"Back in the 1980s, there was a resurgence in interest in travel books, perhaps sparked by the literary historian, Paul Fussell and his book, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars which is a must read. His book also sparked an interest in Robert Byron's book The Road to Oxiana about a 1930s car trip from Europe to Central Asia. I can recommend that, too. Lastly, although he is terribly out of fashion, my favorite travel book, albeit fictional, is by Rudyard Kipling. It's Kim, and the description of the Grand Trunk Road in Northern India rang very true to me, even a hundred years later, and corresponded with my own memories of road travel in Northern India in the early 1960s, when I was very young.

"P.S.: You should do more non-photography book recommendations and reviews here at TOP, from time to time, Mike. I really enjoyed your post."

I wanted to mention—one of the things I am really looking forward to once my "new eye" settles down enough that I can be fitted for glasses is that I hope to be able to enjoy photo books more.

During my hiatus I reposted an old essay called "How to Read a Photographic Book." The method the post described was what I attempted to do a dozen years ago as a way of using my photobooks more. It came to me in 2005 or so that a.) my photobook library was one of my prized possessions, and yet b.) I hardly ever looked at any of the books! So, naturally, I got to wondering what the point was. Why "possess" those books if I wasn't going to actively use them? Just to look at them on the shelf and remind myself how pleasant it had been to look at them when I got them? That didn't seem very sensible. Having books slumbering untouched on a shelf or in a box didn't seem to be doing anyone any good.

So I resolved to figure out a way to use my library. That's when I formalized the method described in "How to Read a Photographic Book." My habit was that I'd take a book down off the shelf most nights, and page through it slowly for a while. I did it with a timer as described in the post for a while, but after I got used to the pace I dispensed with the timer and winged it; the important thing is just to take a slow, languid, moseying pace. It was almost like a kind of meditation, with the photograph as the meditation object. There was no end-point in sight. I wouldn't necessarily go all the way through a book in one night. If I got tired, I'd just put the book up again and resume the next night, from the place I left off, just as you would with a book of words.

I did that for a couple of years, and it was a nice habit. Not only did my book collection come alive again, every denizen of the shelves a candidate for being enjoyed anew, but it charged up my interest in photography. I felt intimately connected with photographs again, in a way I have never quite managed online.

In my 12-step program we acknowledge that we all have to accept "life on life's terms," meaning that all the chaos and complication of life doesn't end just because you give up a destructive habit. Another way of saying the same thing that made me laugh was when someone put it like this: "life gets all lifey." We all knew what she meant, and, yes, it does sometimes.

Anyway life got lifey, and I let my looking-at-photobooks habit more or less lapse, although I still did it (and still do it) now and then. Then, over the past few years, as my vision got worse, those occasions began to get pretty thin. To be honest I was enjoying it less. I always want to see clearly, whether it's in the driver's seat of a car, or through a viewfinder, or just looking around at the world. The pictures in the books were getting less distinct, harder to see. I've observed over the years that any time you're sort of vaguely troubled by any activity, you just sort of gradually drift away from doing it. Thus is was with looking at books.

Medical science might well have given me a "second wind" where the pleasure of seeing is concerned. And while it's mostly the real world that I'm looking forward to seeing more clearly, I find I'm getting more and more psyched up about the prospect of once again reacquainting with the vast store of photographic riches I have right at hand, on printed pages. I'm not there yet, but I'm hoping it's something I have to look forward to.

Mike

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Martin D: "In my study I have a little arm chair on the side, with a little table next to it. Every day I take an hour or two away from the desk to reflect and let ideas grow. Coffee cup on the table. There are photo books on that table too, but more are on the floor next to the chair. I pick up one or two and look at the photographs, sometimes to enjoy the images as images, more often to study these images for technique: how does the photograph deal with contrast, what are the design features of the composition, how would I do this in my own editing? The books on the little table change all the time, but there is always a Walker Evans, always a Berenice Abbott, always an Atget. Also amongst these books are some cheap paperbacks of classic essays by Talbot etc., with my pencil annotations from the past. Photography is one huge stream of tradition into which we can step and refresh ourselves.

"P.S. So good to hear that your renewed eye gives you a refreshed look into the tradition."

Mim: "You've inspired me to drag some of my much-neglected photo books off the shelves, dust them off (sadly, literally) and dive in on a regular basis. I hope I can turn it into a habit. I'd kinda forgotten that, much like I get inspired by a good image shared online, I have a perfectly good source of inspiration just sitting here!"

scott kirkpatrick: "I have a sizable collection of photobooks, accumulated over almost 50 years, and your point about only looking at their shiny covers to recall the good feeling I had when I got 'em is right on target. Ouch, well maybe 80% of them have not been off their shelf in the past few years. And the point made in a comment above about not buying what you already have is also relevant. The post below about photobooks that have been worn to a nub by student handling reminds me that if you look through Parr and Badger's Photo Books History I, II, and III, their collected examples, while still properly covered, have been handled a lot and show it. The philosophy that I like on this comes from the artists and writers of the Toy Story series (I just saw #4). The life in any object comes from the signs that it has been enjoyed!"

Geoff Wittig: "I've discovered the downside to a very large collection of photo books: I become paralyzed by choice. When I have some free time and feel like perusing some good photographs I walk into my library...to confront several thousand volumes. Let's see, should I give another look to Ansel Adams' Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs? Maybe I should check out Charlie Cramer's beautiful little book of Yosemite images. Or maybe one of Eugene Richards' heartfelt documentary books. Or.... Next thing you know, it's time for bed. Kind of like wasting a half hour spinning through the choices on Netflix without watching anything. Sigh."

Mike replies: Nice problem to have though!

[Ed. Note: I had to remove this article from Monday morning because I messed up when I posted it—I inadvertently left some important parts out. I'm leaving this placeholder here so that the comments already written don't get deleted along with the article.

I'll post a revised version on Tuesday. My sincere apologies for the error.]

This morning I've finally finished adding the "Featured Comments" to the "Museum Tricks" post. It makes good reading, I think. There are some great ones. Bear in mind too that "Featured" comments are merely representative comments, not necessarily all the "best" ones. There are some great comments in the Comments Section, too. Comments are featured here on TOP so people who don't have time to read all the comments can conveniently read a few.

Advance notice: I have to take tomorrow off to deal with my car problem. So no new post tomorrow. I owe you one!

Today, just a question: Say you had an important friend who was building a personal photo library of, say, 500 to 1,500 books, and had the means to acquire it (but perhaps not the means to acquire the great rarities for $1,000+ per volume). If you could recommend only one photography book to that person for his library, what would it be?

Mine would be Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski, which I've recommended many times over the years, and which most readers have liked and a few others not so much. I saw a review on Amazon, by a customer named David Van Elslande, of Gisele Freund's Photography and Society (another book that greatly influenced me in my tender and impressionable youth*). It said, in a parenthetical, "...unfortunately digital pictures were not widespread yet when the book was written so 'our' generation is not studied here." Same is true of Looking at Photographs, I must admit. It came out in 1973...although of course it looks at all the eras prior to that; it merely doesn't look at the eras that were still in the future when it was written. Still, David has a point: a new look at a choice hundred pictures from MoMA's collection circa 2019 would be quite different. I still love the book.

But enough about my pick. What's yours?

Mike

*And that I tried to get reprinted in the '90s. The publisher told me that the rights to all the illustrations and to the translation would be impossible to clear.

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Here’s the situation

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Greg Heins: "All very good, but now suppose the person is under 50 years old. Then what would you recommend?"

Mike replies: An excellent question. Let me think about that.

Eric Perlberg: "This is a most impossible task. But given the party-game limitation of just one book my choice would be The Solitude Of Ravens by Masahisa Fukase, recently republished [as Ravens —Ed.] so one can avoid the rare book market stratospheric prices."

Martin Doonan: "It would depend on the purpose of the collection. However, if the aim were to be photography appreciation, in a broad sense, then I would recommend to your friend to buy something that was furthest from their current tastes in photography as possible. I've found I've gained a much better appreciation of photography by challenging my tastes than pandering to them. Having said that, my favourite (from my modest collection) is Sugimoto's Architecture."

I really like this book, but I had to learn how to enjoy it. You know that third helping of dessert when the first helping was ecstatically delicious, or rides at Six Flags, or that friend of yours who's full of new jokes, amazing facts, facile wordplay, excessive bonhomie, and too much energy by half, but who wears you out after three or four hours? You can get too much of a good thing, is my point.

What I've learned to do with this book is to sit down, crack it open randomly, and look long, hard, and contemplatively at twelve to fifteen pictures—and then put the book up till my next visit. It seems to amplify properly that way. I didn't enjoy my first run-through; I've enjoyed it increasingly since. "Your mileage may vary."

On the other hand, beware trying to "get" him from one picture. Ken Josephson is a conceptual photographer whose work "playfully highlights the illusive nature of photography" and whose photographs are "deliberately composed to draw attention to [their] artifice," according to his gallery's bio.

I didn't like him as well when his style was much more in fashion. It's not any more, which makes it better.

The Light of Coincidence. University of Texas Press. Amazon U.S., Amazon U.K., The Book Depository (with free International shipping).

Mike

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Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'What I've learned to do with this book is to sit down, crack it open randomly, and look long, hard, and contemplatively at twelve to fifteen pictures—and then put the book up till my next visit,' That's about what I've done with this book, too, although I did make one concerted campaign from cover-to-cover when I first got it. Here in Chicago Ken Josephson's name is probably more familiar than anywhere else. He hailed from Detroit and studied at RIT but really began growing his chops at the old Institute of Design (now IIT) here in Chicago. 'Conceptual photographer' = academic, at least in those days. He basically taught photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly 40 years. Hence, he's well-known here, although I'd not ever seen or met him until he gave a talk at the MCA earlier this year.

"I enjoy his work. More specifically, I enjoy his eye and his reflexes. He has a wry sense of irony and humor that was rare in his day and nearly nonexistent in photography today. I've felt that he's in great jeopardy of becoming remembered almost exclusively for one small body of his work that gained popularity in recent years; those pictures of pictures in scenes. According to Ken, they were more playful than 'conceptual.' But that's now tattooed darkest into the scant public recognition of his work.

"Ken Josephson has spent a lifetime guiding young artists on their early paths at one of America's foremost art schools. So I suspect his view of his own work has become very flexible over the decades. Given the nature of his remarks at his MCA talk, I suspect he'd completely endorse your dosage suggested for ingesting his work, Mike.

"Readers might be interested in seeing and hearing Ken's remarks regarding his recent retrospective show at Chicago's MCA, here and here."

Bill Bresler: "I've never been a fan of conceptual photography, but that photo of the old Volvo with the snow shadow really grabbed me and sort of messed with my head. I was in junior high and just starting to mess around with my dad's camera when I saw the pic in Popular Photography or Modern Photography. It kind of opened me up to the possibilities. I'm closing out my career as a photojournalist in a few days, so maybe it's time to go back and take a closer look."

So we met Sarah Meister of MoMA the other day, and come to find out she has a short book coming out soon about Dorothea Lange's most famous picture—at one time it was considered the most famous single picture in the entire history of World photography—the so-called "Migrant Mother," photography's Mona Lisa.

It's called, simply enough, Lange: Migrant Mother. It's an inexpensive paperback. Here it is at Amazon UK. and it can be shipped worldwide from The Book Depository. It's part of a series from the Museum of Modern Art called "One on One," showcasing single items in its collections. This will be the first title about a photograph; other books in the series include Andrew Wyeth: Christina's World by Laura Hoptman and De Chirico: The Song of Love by Emily Braun.

You can't study every subject deeply; you can't know every author's or artist's work intimately; you can't engage with every photographer, and for the most part we can't learn all there is to know about single images, even presuming that they're worth studying that closely in the first place. But I believe it's still important to get to know a few artists or authors well, and study at least one subject until you're closer to an expert than a dilettante, and follow a few stories until you're confident you know what really happened. Knowing one thing in depth gives you insight into how much there is to know about all the things you don't have time to learn about. 

This is a short book, only 48 pages. Joe Holmes called Sarah Meister "incredibly articulate, plain-spoken [and] open" in her videos, and I'll be interested to see if those qualities come through the written word as well.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

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