Thunder and Lightning/Lauren Redniss: reflections

Not long ago, my husband and I escaped to Frenchtown, NJ. I taught memoir on a Sunday, then spoke, the next day, to an assembly of high school students. My husband walked the banks of the Delaware and found, he said, great peace. Quietude. The occasional passerby. Fish that seemed to come when called.

Peace. I search for it, too. Shield myself from incipient interruptions, step away from active unkindness, shrink from noise, read deep into the news with a hope for understanding.

And, always, books. Over the last few days, during a storm of work, I've reached repeatedly for Lauren Redniss's glorious Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future—an illustrated (Adam Gopnik rightly calls it illuminated) collage of odd facts, hard science, and Redniss's signature way of seeing.

This is a book so unto itself that it comes to its readers utterly undefended. No introduction. A simmering table of contents. Facts lassoed from a multitude of unexpected sources. We meet the managers of a cemetery who are left with the sweep of dislocated bones, post storm. The secret keepers of the Farmers Almanac. A company called Planalytics, which is apparently right down the road from me and is designed to help companies plan for weather incursions, the spiking needs wrought by heat and hurricane. Weaponized weather experts. The inventors of cloudbusters. The mad-scientist brain of Nathan Myhrvold (now at work on, among other things, solar radiation management), the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (who is popping up in many things I've read lately), and the seeds that burst to life every eight years ago in the desert.

What binds it all is erudition, curiosity, and appetite for the alluringly strange. What makes it so peaceful to hold, to sit with, to ponder is how much it teaches through story, ink saturation, and hieroglyphics.

We see so many books that are "just like" books—books that are, indeed, marketed that way. Peace, though, is the original mind set free. I'll wake at 4 AM for this. I'll read it by a lamp in the lonesome dark.

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Amazing Grace

Last night, in the second tier at Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center, a three-year old boy sat beside me. He was flawlessly dressed—his burnt orange jacket matching the laces on his shoes, his collar up around his ears, his pants dark, his shirt bright white—and his eyes were two fully rounded moons.

He sat on his grandmother's lap beside his mother, his uncles, his aunts, another child, perhaps his brother, while beyond, on the stage in that gorgeous, vibrant space, the Soweto Gospel Choir sang, and not only sang, but danced. Songs in Sotho, songs in Zulu, and the most revering, reverberating rendition of "Amazing Grace" that I will ever hear.

Through it all, the boy sat there on his grandmother's lap—undistracted, utterly seduced—his hands coming together for the beat, and sometimes he would syncopate that beat, and sometimes he would yield to the left, to the right, bend like a reed, for the choir's songs required dance of all of us. The colors of its costumes—mango, plum, lemon, salted lime—would not let our eyes go.

And then one among them on that stage said (a lilt in her voice, a song even as she spoke) that the Soweto Gospel Choir was singing for peace and global union. She said that, and the place went absolutely wild—first the clapping, then the roaring, then some standing tall, to say yes, yes, global union—and the child beside me went wild, too. As if he knew.

For he has his whole life ahead of him, and peace is still a possibility.

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