Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Paulette Jiles
The Color of Lightning
William Morrow
Stick a thumb into any page of Paulette Jiles’s The Color of Lightning and you’ll pull out a fine prose plum. The San Antonio author has trademarked an offhand lyricism, and she displays it amply in this intelligent Civil War–era novel: “Britt and Mary slept with the two children between them. They lay in their blankets like parentheses around the two lives in their care.” The book is based on the life of Britt Johnson, an emancipated black man living in north-central Texas circa 1870. After a Kiowa and Comanche raiding party kills his son and kidnaps the rest of his family, Johnson launches a one-man expedition into Indian Territory to retrieve them. Though he negotiates their release and carries them safely home, his wife, Mary, never recovers from her physical and emotional injuries, and his remaining children, a girl named Cherry and a boy named Jube, quietly miss the wild freedom of life among the Indians. Frontier war between settlers and Indians temporarily gives way to the federal government’s Peace Policy, but cultural differences and territorial disputes inevitably lead to a return to violence. Radical, bloody sociopolitical change swirls and eddies around Johnson, his fellow settlers, and his Indian adversaries. Jiles has created a place and time in which hope’s only role is to sustain people until the next cataclysm. William Morrow, $25.99
Jeff Guinn
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde
Simon & Schuster
Jeff Guinn’s Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde is an entertaining, meticulously researched biography that gleans fact from the fables that grew up around this Depression-era outlaw duo. Clyde Barrow was the son of a junk man in the slums of west Dallas, and Bonnie Parker was a dirt-poor dreamer living across the Trinity River in Cement City. By their first meeting, in January 1930, the twenty-year-old Clyde had become a common crook and the nineteen-year-old Bonnie a hard-drinking scrapper (she “fought her way” through school, her mother said). The pair were instantly inseparable, and within two years their obsessive love match had morphed into a full-fledged criminal enterprise. Guinn gleefully dispels the self-delusional image they propagated via posed photos—there was little glamour in their inept spree of robbing and killing. During the day, they stole cars and pulled petty heists; at night they slept restlessly in seedy motels or sprawled across the backseats of sedans. By the time a posse gunned them down in the 1934 Gibsland ambush, it was clear that America’s gun-toting sweethearts were sociopaths who had literally stolen their way into the national spotlight. Simon & Schuster, $27
Rupert Isaacson
Rupert Isaacson
After their two-year-old son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004, the author and his wife, Kristin, struggled with the challenge of finding effective treatment for an incontinent, uncommunicative child given to intractable tantrums. The Horse Boy: A father’s quest to heal his son tells of their journey to Mongolia, in 2007, in search of shamans who might unlock the mystery of Rowan’s autism. A documentary about their trip—Over the Hills and Far Away—was featured at this year’s Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals. The former travel writer and journalist lives with his family outside Austin.
Were there early clues that Rowan was autistic? Yes, there were early clues—very obsessive behaviors and, the most alarming symptom, he began to suffer from neurological fits that caused tremendous, inconsolable tantrums.
What treatments and therapies were available to Rowan in and around Austin? We tried applied behavioral analysis. We tried viral treatments. We tried the gluten- and casein-free diet. But the only things that showed radical, immediate change were Rowan’s exposure to Betsy [a neighbor’s horse] and his brief exposure to African shamans during our visit to the U.N. in 2004. When I first put him on Betsy, he began to talk properly for the first time.
How did the simple idea of animal therapy evolve into an epic excursion to Mongolia? It was natural to ask myself the question, What if I took Rowan to a place that combined horses and shamanism at the center of its culture? Did such a place exist? Yes, it did—Mongolia, the place where mankind first domesticated the horse six thousand years ago and where Equus caballus evolved. What if we were to go there, I wondered, and ride from shaman to shaman? What might happen?
How did Rowan and the Mongolian shamans react to one another? Nine shamans agreed to gather near Ulaanbaatar to perform a ritual on Rowan. Rowan didn’t like the ritual at first, finding the drumming and chanting confusing and overwhelming. However, after about an hour he started giggling, laughing, playing with the shamans. And at the end of the ritual he did something he’d never done before. He turned to this small Mongolian boy, hugged him, and said, “Mongolian brother.” Rowan had made his first friend.
Then he spent three days with a shaman named Ghoste, who told us that Rowan would be gradually less and less autistic until the age of nine, but the stuff that really drove us crazy—the incontinence, the neurological fits and endless tantrums—would stop immediately. By the time we got home, he had stopped having tantrums altogether, and we were no longer even involved in his toilet activities. It was extraordinary.
What does the future hold for Rowan? Good question. Ghoste and the other shamans were pretty adamant that Rowan will become a shaman himself in later life. Certainly a lot of shamans I’ve met in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere do come across as adult autists—but ones with roles and functions at the center of their societies, rather than being marginalized. He’s also doing a regular first-grade curriculum now. And he says he wants to be a zookeeper and an elephant trainer. Horses he can take for granted. I guess we’ll see. Like everything else about autism, and life in general, it’s an enigma. Little, Brown, $24.99
