Nonfiction Reccomends

[DHBirr]

Evan S. Connell was a writer of novels, short stories, poetry — and several non-fiction essays of a generally history / sociology-oriented nature.  The Aztec Treasure House is a 2001 collection of the latter, twenty of them; eighteen had been previously collected in The White Lantern and A Long Desire.  I've quoted at least one of these essays elsewhere on this site.

Talking about Henry Rawlinson climbing a precipice to copy an ancient Persian inscription:

Visualizing him at the top of a rickety ladder propped on a rock ledge 300 feet above the ground, with a notebook in one hand, meticulously copying some little wedge-shaped marks—seeing him in that position one is reminded of other nineteenth-century English men and women:  Mawson and Shackleton at the South Pole, Franklin in the Arctic, Fanny Bullock Workman in the Himalayas, "Chinese Gordon" in Egypt, Mary Kingsley having tea with cannibals, Lady Hester Stanhope costumed as a Bedouin riding in triumph through the ruined streets of of Palmyra.  Faced with such people, one can't help thinking that the nineteenth-century English must have been utterly bonkers.

Talking about Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, mentioned in the previous extract:

Now the predicament in which he found himself is absurd; if it appeared on a movie screen the audience would cackle and hoot.  The old Saturday serials used to conclude like this:  our hero inextricably, fundamentally, unconditionally, and grievously trapped.
Here is what we have.  We have Sir Douglas, harnessed to his sledge for easier pulling, dangling at the end of the rope.  Below him the camera reveals a bottomless gorge.  Above him the sledge has caught in deep snow but at any instant it may break loose.  If that happens Sir Douglas will plunge into frozen eternity.
He is exhausted by his ordeal, having already outlasted two other men.  He is dizzy, freezing, poisoned, and half-starved.  His feet are not just killing him, they are literally falling apart.  He is alone in the Antarctic, the grimmest place on earth, no help within miles.  Even if somebody should come looking for him, which nobody will, he could not be rescued because he could not be found.  He is out of sight—invisible—not figuratively but actually out of sight, dangling below the surface of the glacier.
So there you have it, a real disappointment.  Pauline's perils were nothing.  And Sir Douglas certainly thinks he has enjoyed his last bowl of dog-paw soup.
You may wonder how he got out.
Don't miss next week's episode.

Essays include discussion of pre-Cro-Magnon hominids, the Etruscans, Vikings reaching North America, the Children's Crusades, Prester John, the Northwest Passage, the origins of the Atlantis story, alchemy, and the conquistadors' gold-hunting.