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‘There is light in the darkness’: Book by former WSU football great Steve Gleason gives readers a powerful glimpse into life with ALS

Great books change a reader.

Maybe they transport readers to unexamined places, such as inside a person’s mind once a body has abandoned it. Or maybe they cause readers to abandon long-held notions of human limitations.

So it is with Steve Gleason’s “A Life Impossible.” Subtitled: “Living with ALS: Finding Peace and Wisdom Within a Fragile Existence.” Published by Alfred J. Knopf, with a release date of April 29.

A graduate of Gonzaga Prep and former football and baseball standout at Washington State, Gleason is now a philosopher, activist, survivor. And, specific to our purpose today, he’s an extremely talented story-teller.

Allow Gleason to explain his life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: “(ALS) is relentless and humiliating. It progressively robs people of their motor skills and, in turn, destroys their quality of life. Although your senses and brain remain sharp, you gradually lose the ability to walk, talk, swallow and breathe.”

After having been a chiseled 210 pounds as a seven-year NFL veteran, the 47-year-old Gleason writes that he is now “… an emaciated meat sack of flesh and bones. I’ve lived in a wheelchair for more than a decade. I’ve lived on a ventilator since 2014.”

He calls his motionless body “a prison,” but, thanks to eye-tracking technology, he still communicates to the world, sharing his frustrations and fears, with a unique perspective.

At this point, Gleason’s every breath is generated by a machine. With arduous eye movements, “typing” on a digital keyboard, he reveals how truly fragile his existence is. For instance, when he is taken off his ventilator for 90 seconds and helped into the shower: “It’s like a practice of dying.”

But with an optimistic caveat that is common in nearly every revelation of unimaginable hardship in the book, Gleason appreciatively adds, “I do not take one glorious, oxygen-rich, ineffable breath for granted.”

For 320 pages, Gleason provides accounts of these skirmishes between his bestilled body and his kinetic mind.

It is raw and honest and eloquent.

“The desire to do something to prove my value has been a theme in my life, even before ALS,” he writes. “I’m a decade past my expiration date, and I’m alive! I have an opportunity to grow stronger, be better and begin again.”

Gleason has been proving his value, in nonlethal circumstances, for a long time.

His story has be widely covered, but a brief history for those unfamiliar:

Gleason starred in football and baseball at Gonzaga Prep and WSU. Undersized for his position, he was fast and fierce, loving contact, with a knack for finding the action.

“Athletics was the engine that gave me the confidence to do everything I did,” Gleason writes. “My success in athletics allowed me to shed my shyness and social awkwardness.”

Initially undrafted in 2000, he fashioned a career on NFL special teams, where his ballistic qualities of velocity and force made him a game-changer for the New Orleans Saints.

His blocked punt in the Saints’ first home game after Hurricane Katrina was so widely viewed as a symbol of the city’s 2006 rebirth that it was immortalized in a statue outside the Superdome.

Jeff Duncan, collaborator with Gleason on the book, covered the Saints during Gleason’s years, and remembers him as a charismatic iconoclast, often found quietly reading a novel in his cubicle amid teammates’ boisterous locker room behavior, or telling inquisitive reporters stories of his far-flung adventure travels in the offseason.

Gleason’s unconventional, life-embracing approach endeared him to Saints fans, Duncan said. Gleason became even more popular with fans when he married New Orleanian Michel Varisco, an embodiment of her home town – artistic, fun-loving, joyful.

Everything changed when Gleason began feeling progressively weaker in 2011, and was diagnosed, at age 33, with an incurable condition predicted to kill him within two to five years.

As his physical abilities decreased, his international profile as an activist for ALS treatment and causes expanded, leading to his recognition as a Congressional Gold Medal winner in 2020 – the first NFL player to be so acknowledged.

As Duncan explains Gleason’s laborious writing via eye movements, it evokes the image of medieval monks, cloistered in their scriptoria, delicately producing manuscripts at an interminable pace.

“It’s really kind of mind-blowing,” Duncan said of the device. “It has an infrared beam that is beamed from his computer tablet into his retina and bounces off the cornea back onto where he fixes his gaze.”

Gleason also had the foresight to build a library of his speaking voice before losing it, and can now call upon a synthesized “voice” to help with communication.

Gleason had given many of his last days with waning mobility to the process of making the 2016 documentary, “Gleason,” and was initially hesitant to take on the book project when Duncan approached him.

“Steve very much believes in telling the truth, (given) his level of candor and honesty, and the unvarnished look at what the disease does,” Duncan said. “He and Michel wanted to lay it all out there and be truthful about it because they want people to see what it’s really like. Steve says over and over, ‘We don’t want an after-school special or Disney story, this is going to be real,’ and I think that’s what makes it so powerful.”

The book is complete, current and ably stands alone. But as a sensory accompaniment, I would recommend readers watch the “Gleason” documentary, which supplies the sights and sounds of Steve’s increasing struggle to communicate.

The images capture the exhaustion in the eyes of his wife, and allows the viewer to sense the unrelenting demands upon her. In one scene, it shows Michel trying to bottle-feed their son, Rivers, with one hand, while tending Steve with the other.

Steve and Michel humbly reject the notion of being heroic. “Both of them are adamant that they’re just humans trying to navigate this the best they can,” Duncan said. “(They say) we’ve got flaws and we’re going to show those (too).”

The book advances the narrative of the documentary, into Gleason’s more recent stages, with the pages giving voice to his thousand internal screams, and translating the rage otherwise visible only through his eyes. It also reveals the peace he’s found in his release of expectations for himself.

Within the first chapters, Gleason recounts scenes of the “brutal powerlessness and vulnerability” he feels each day, from the humbling process of waste-extraction that requires the help of caretakers, to those moments when his daughter, Gray, may cry for her father’s attention while Steve is helpless to calm or comfort her.

“Life became a dance with change and loss,” he writes. “I would lose abilities, we would adapt … each loss forced us to develop new routines.”

Gleason gives an example of the ennobling/humbling dualities of his life. In the summer of 2012, he attended a ceremony outside the Superdome, unveiling the statue of his symbolic punt block.

“It was an epic day,” Gleason writes. “But on our way home from the ceremony, I was losing the ability to control my bowel movements. As soon as we rolled into the house, I pooped all over myself in the wheelchair.”

Such stark polarities, “… are my life.”

The greatest loss? Losing the ability to converse with Michel, Gleason writes, eroded the foundational friendship that had been at the root of their love. “This didn’t tear me up … it obliterated me.”

Michel was also obliterated, he writes, as her care-taking duties took a withering toll. “We were more like nurse and patient than husband and wife.”

In the book’s most moving and revelatory segment, Gleason directly extracts from his typed “chat” conversation with Michel the moment they openly addressed the marital fractures caused by their years of shared struggle.

It would be hard for the most talented fiction writer to capture this level of painful unburdening as Steve and Michel reckoned with the forces that were pulling them apart.

Lose and adapt. Again, looking deeper into himself, Gleason realized the value of what was left inside.

“Through tears of grief, I was reborn.”

In 2018, Steve and Michel welcomed a second child, Gray, through in-vitro fertilization.

The latter chapters in his book reveal such developments, as well as an important discovery of acceptance.

“We all face the impossible at some point in our lives,” Gleason writes. “By exploring acceptance, love and the power of the human spirit … I recognize the innate peace in the midst of chaos. There is light in the darkness. The light within us all. Every precious moment. I know it. I live it.”

The only gift of having everything taken away is how it allows a person to discover what is at their core.

If, as he claims, he is now an emaciated meat sack, he remains fueled by a powerful spirit – indomitable and inspiring – living a life impossible.

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Light in the darkness: a book review, 4 comments:.

I am done! I felt we should encourage everyone into the world of reading and writing world. THanks for the summary.

I am totally in agreement Sancha sir. we shud buy their books

Nothing is impossible if we give a try...

I am thoroughly disturbed with the book review. I should buyone for my children to learn the situation faced by writer.

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Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us

A fascinating and thought-provoking investigation into the nature of black holes—a blend of the spiritual, the philosophical, and the scientific—from the premier German astrophysicist who made history in 2018, capturing the first one on film.

A Light in the Darkness  is the story of one of the greatest astrological achievements of all time: the first photographic evidence of black holes in April 2018, and its significance for humanity, told by the scientist who accomplished it. A man of faith ordained in the Protestant tradition, Heino Falcke wrestles with the ways in which black holes force us to confront the boundary where human life ends and the celestial begins. He also ponders why black holes are difficult for most of us to understand—comparing it to our inability to envisage our own inevitable death.

Black holes develop in outer space when a massive star dies, and its matter is condensed. That extreme amount of mass contained in a small space generates a gigantic amount of gravitational force, allowing the black hole to suck up everything that comes near, including light. These astronomical wonders are the subject of our greatest scientific and philosophical theorizing—the journey to a black hole would be the journey to the end of time itself. In this way, Falcke regards them as the most exquisite representations of fear, death . . . and, surprisingly, the divine.

Empirical and profound,  A Light in the Darkness  is the first work to examine both the physical nature and spiritual meaning of black holes, those astrophysical mysteries Falcke, calls “the epitome of merciless destruction.”

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Book Review: The Light Within Darkness

THE LIGHT WITHIN DARKNESS by David C. Jeffrey is a fantastic addition to the Space Unbound series that delivers on the promises made in earlier novels. Reviewed by Joelene Pynnonen.

The Light Within Darkness

by David C. Jeffrey

Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy

ISBN: 9780998674261

Print Length: 422 pages

Reviewed by Joelene Pynnonen

A fantastic addition to the Space Unbound series that delivers on the promises made in earlier novels

A planet that can seed new worlds. A dangerous man who wants to replace all life with his monstrous creations. For Aiden Macallan, Commander of the state-of-the-art flagship, Sun Wolf, these are the sorts of situations he’s faced with daily. When a powerful half-cyborg, half-clone assassin attacks him, however, he realizes that the threat humanity is facing will be more lethal than ever before. 

Suspicions rise that Cardew, the man who killed Aiden’s mother, is generating forces in an attempt to overthrow all natural life. The Sun Wolf’s new mission is to find out where Cardew is hiding in the mostly uncharted solar systems beyond Bound Space. The precarious mission hinges on one single clue from the mind of a broken man. A clue that may have been planted by humanity’s worst enemy.

Space Unbound is a series that just keeps delivering. Light Within Darkness , the third book, takes place seven months after the events of Sun Wolf . Unlike its predecessor, it would be difficult to read this one without starting at the beginning. The world is incredibly well set up but complex enough that rehashing the entire thing with each new book is impossible. The timeline in the beginning is helpful for remembering the events of previous books and the political landscape, but a glossary of terms would make this a much easier read.

This series does a fantastic job of raising stakes. In every novel so far, the main characters have become more powerful. And, in every novel so far, the antagonist has become more terrifying. In Light Within Darkness the threat that was taking shape in Sun Wolf becomes a palpable and horrifying reality. The emergence of cloneborg assassins—enemies that are smart, fast, practically unkillable, entirely lacking in empathy—amps the tension up tenfold.

The worldbuilding never fails to amaze me. In every book, the world has unfolded a little more, but in a seamless, organic way that completely changes the trajectory of the novel. The voidoids, portals used to cover vast distances in space, were the game-changers of the second novel. In this one, it’s the way certain planets can bring life to other planets. The way that the whole of known space is working toward the advancement of itself. 

The interconnectedness of the Universe is a theme that runs through the Space Unbound series, and it only gets stronger in Light Within Darkness . While I love the feeling that the Universe is an ecosystem in which all parts function together, the execution of the theme lost me here. Previous novels in the series have a little fantasy scattered through the hard sci-fi. In Light Within Darkness, the fantasy element is much stronger. With Elgin Woo playing a larger role in this novel, a feeling of pseudo-science invades the piece. Technically he’s meant to be a scientist, but on the page he’s more like a shaman. He knows things without forming hypotheses or conducting experiments. It waters an otherwise powerful story down.

The stakes are higher, the villains more terrifying, and the worldbuilding more complex than ever before. At its heart, The Light Within Darkness remains a deeply personal foray into the wonder of humanity, nature, and life, while it takes you on a fantastic adventure led by a compelling crew.

Thank you for reading Joelene Pynnonen’s book review of The Light Within Darkness by David C. Jeffrey! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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This sure has enlightened me more about this specific aspect. Thank you!

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A Light in the Darkness

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Book Review

Reviewed by Michelle Robertson for Readers' Favorite

The war in Europe during WWII is well known for Nazi SS soldiers, Hitler, American soldiers, different battles, and of course the Holocaust. Most people don't think of individual lives, thoughts, or relationships during such a chaotic time. The tendency to hate one’s enemy or race, soldier or individual was a growing trend throughout the world. What if you did not hate your "supposed" enemy, but rather you were madly in love with them? Come share a thrilling, suspenseful, and heartfelt tale of a French nurse and a German engineer as they fall in love with one another right before WWII broke out. Francine and Hans adore one another deeply. Francine is a very expressive, outspoken, and independent young woman, and has captured the interest and heart of Hans. When the war starts, everything they felt for each other is forced to end as they must go their separate ways. Will their love survive the pain, suffering, and horrible events the war would lead them to experience? Will they still love each other when they meet again one day in the most unexpected place? A Light in the Darkness: During WWII, a French Nurse and a German man Fight for Love Beyond Borders by Regina Santos is an incredibly suspenseful romance and adventure novel. Readers will experience the many emotions young love can endure, the horrific events of the war, and the extreme prejudice in and amongst it all. The author writes the story plot and characters with such impeccable skill and talent that it is as if the reader is experiencing the happenings themselves. A reader can gain historical knowledge, feel emotional connections, and learn of the importance of hope and faith during a struggle from this book.

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A light in the darkness

I had been to Wales in the vacation, a time alternating between sunshine and bitter cold, and dominated by the sound of ewes bleating after their lambs, and lambs after their ewes. I had never seen so many rams together as I saw from the windowseat of my bedroom looking towards the snow on the Brecon Beacons.

One day my hostess, Sophia, tried to drive me to the bookshops at Hay. Just over the hills I noticed a yearling lamb with a nasty red blot between its hind legs: it would have worried me for a few minutes and then vanished, leaving nothing except, perhaps, a slight inflammation in the memory, if the car had not grumbled to a hopeless stop opposite a farm a couple of hundred yards further on. I walked back to look at the lamb. It certainly had a bloody patch between its hind legs.

I walked back again to consult the farmer, who said that those on the hill beyond the stream weren't his sheep, but perhaps it had had its tail bitten off by a ewe, or else it had been de-tailed. His wife added that if it was walking about, it would be all right. So again I walked back, and after all the yearling was walking and cropping grass, and plainly the red blot was where its tail had been.

I do that sort of thing a lot. I suppose there is a moral component to it, but not much, since I am normally not able, nor do I even expect to be able, to do anything. I once pulled a sheep out of the mud in a ditch near the Upper Rie by Lewes, and I once picked up a swallow that had got trapped in St Anne's church, and once a mountain swift that was crawling on the floor of the highest bedroom in the Pera Palace in Constantinople: utterly helpless things for which something simple can be done that is neither frightening nor messy. Mostly it is just the ordinary slightly neurotic worry of a man with time to worry. It does little good.

Two days later, I came home on a rush-hour train which, perhaps, is one of the circumstances without which I should not have been able to tell this story, and what would have happened would have been much nastier, and much sooner forgotten: because as I got off the train at Lewes and laboured up the station steps, my friend, Ian Littlewood, a fellow lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, came up behind me, and since my luggage was too heavy for anything but a taxi, and it wasn't convenient to talk then, suggested I came in for a drink later that evening. I telephoned him when I got home, and said it should be much later, as I'd discovered that the first chapter of a D Phil thesis on literature and society in the period of Charles I's personal rule had arrived at the post office in my absence, and I had to see its author the following day. Everything got later and later.

I called on my mother at the nursing home where she was living, and then had to pick up the draft chapter from the sorting office. I read it in John Kenward's restaurant over sirloin with mushrooms, half a bottle of Beaune and a glass of Chateau Liot. Perhaps the contented state of mind which that induced was important, too.

After 11 o'clock, I walked down the High Street to Ian's cottage in Brooman's Lane. He gave me scotch and we talked about his time in Morocco and mine in Wales, Alan Sinfield's book on Protestant England and my TLS review of the Arthurian poems of Charles Williams. We talked much more than either of us supposed, for both of us would have said it was not much after half past twelve when I left, whereas it was a good three-quarters of an hour later. I noticed something like that on the clock on the town tower, as I went up the hill through that area where one antiquary thinks King Alfred built the defensive mound for his fortress, and the façades are now prosperous and Georgian, past the war memorial with its lovely bare-breasted angels, where the three roads meet.

It was natural enough that I went towards the tower. Under it is the shortest cut from Ian's cottage to mine in New Road, and when, once perhaps in three weeks, I drank late at night with him, I used more usually to take that way - unless an owl was calling, which would take me up the High Street, since that tended to be its path.

Lewes is very interesting at that time of night - extremely lonely, with the slightly metallic, shadowy light of the street lamps giving the sense of a kind of canopy between oneself and the everlasting dark. And part of the charm of the town is that changes in quality of district, which in London might take miles, happen in a few yards; from Georgian houses, such as those by the war memorial, it is only a step to the mean terraces of cottages that Eve Garnett draws in The Family from One End Street. And then, because of the change of levels, there are places like Helen Waddell's cottage on Castle Banks above Mount Pleasant, of which she said "at sunset, hanging as it does like a cell above the world, with the strange haze turning golden, you feel you have come to a holy place".

This night I went through and under the town tower and the bell called Gabriel. When I was through the little court beyond the tower and in Market Lane by the Shades bar of the Crown, I heard a noise in front which then I put down to cats, but a little later to something else - a series of wails.

They didn't much affect me. For a few steps further on I did what I've done 10,000 times when out walking, and late at night especially. I stopped, and wondered whether to go straight forward, towards Brack Mount and the sound of the cats, or right. I thought, as I've thought 10,000 times, that something immensely important might hang on my decision. I don't remember whether with that thought came its usual companion, the memory of how Rider Haggard was twice saved from murder in Africa, once because he turned back from a night journey home, remembering the cloak that he'd left behind, and once because he wanted to show friends a mountainous and moonlit road, on two nights when his enemies were waiting for him. These thoughts disturb me, and I wonder if there is a means to hear the way divine providence would have me go. I end up reflecting that divine providence may as well work obliquely, by what I think I do from my own reserves, as by anything like a direct voice. Then I moved on.

If I'd thought of it as a starry night, if it had been a night of full moon, I'd probably have gone by the castle and admired the Gothic outline of its towers against the moon - and gone home to bed. But I went right, through the car park, and skipped over the low wall at its bottom. I went forward by the pavement towards the corner of the depressing Pont-Street-Dutch building by Commercial Square. Two cars in quick succession came round the corner and shot by me, breaking the quiet, and I crossed over to the police station.

It's the easiest thing to do, though not the most direct, because Commercial Square makes a large open space dangerous with traffic along the straight left-hand route. Besides, I look at the posters outside the police station of people murdered, and of the man who went through the windscreen. Did I then? I think I did, but I do not remember.

Had I already heard, or did I begin to hear as I went along Mount Pleasant in the streetlight, a noise which I thought was the same sound I'd heard before by the Shades bar? I have an external picture of myself hurrying from Ron's general shop, by the elegant antique shop and the sleeping houses, but the internal memory is gone, and, though I think the hurry was because of the urgency in the noise, it may have been because I wanted to get home.

The noise was a wailing and I now realised that it was certainly a child. Usually that noise at night is just a child teething, and yet one wonders why the parents aren't comforting it. I don't know why, this time, I was busybody enough to turn opposite Castle Banks into Abinger Place to find out which window the wailing came from. Was I just full enough with food and drink to be curious, or was it that the wailing was sharper-edged than usual? It didn't come from the house on the corner, and when I'd passed the telephone box, it didn't come from the next house either, but from right behind me. Did I recognise that it came from the kiosk? No, I think not. It was just that by now I needed to explore: and I opened the heavy, red painted and glass door. The light was brighter in the kiosk, of course, and I looked at the empty shelf below the list of dialling codes. On the floor and to the left, by the wall at the corner with the door there was a light-brown paper carrier bag with string handles. And it was certain that the wailing was coming from that. There was wrapping cloth in it, and out of it kicked a small, naked, brown-pink foot.

I am emboldened by Tony Nuttall, another friend and colleague in the English department at Sussex, whose first question was, "Did you think it would be horribly maimed?", to say that that was exactly what I did think. I remembered a girl called Jill who found a paper bag with, she never said quite what, but I think it was the remains of an abortion,in the passages of the London Underground. Of course, I didn't think quite that, because there was the foot and the wailing. I think I thought of a premature birth though, and in any case that there might be the need for a medical expert; and one's instinct and instruction is "Don't touch". I didn't, either, think of touching the telephone. How can you explain - who believes you - on the telephone?

The next thing I remember is whisking through the doors of the police station 50 yards back, and pressing the button by the window that summoned the officer on duty. He obviously didn't quite believe me, even face to face. I suspect that my form of words was, "I think I've found an abandoned baby in the telephone kiosk by Abinger Place" - or, "I think there's an abandoned baby..." He took my name, address and telephone number and to what I suppose was my shocked and expectant face said, "We'll investigate."

I went quickly enough back to the kiosk, but whether they believed me or not, a police car was there as I arrived, and two youngish policemen were getting out.

One opened the door and said, "There is a child here", and pulled the carrier bag up and out so eagerly that his companion said "Careful!" The one with the bag said, "How could anyone do such a thing? I suppose she just couldn't cope... and in Lewes, too."

They were in the warmth of the car at once, and it shot off with the child into the dark. I lingered and walked a little into the darkness down Abinger Place, down to where the town gallows used to be. I thought perhaps that whoever had left the child there might have waited to see what happened. Perhaps they had, but I found no one. More police cars began to draw up; one picked me up, and its driver first took me down to the duck pond called the Pells - as he said, there might be someone about in urgent need of care - and then back to the police station to make a statement. They brought a dog, too, to explore any scent there might be, but they found no trace.

I was telephoned at the university next morning, where I had gone to wait for my graduate student. The policeman said that the child was a girl, and doing well. She was only three hours old when I found her, and "a bit cold at the extremities".

The car had taken her to the Lewes cottage hospital, but then immediately down to the Royal Sussex in Brighton, to be put in an incubator. Did I have any objection to my name being used? They wanted to generate as much publicity as possible over the weekend and in the following week, in the hope that the mother might change her mind. I was sleepy, and it was a sunny day, and I only felt cheerful about the whole thing. I went up to town for a walk through Chaucer's and Dick Whittington's London, so wasn't in the first round of televising and photographing. My mother's nursing home was murmurous with excitement that evening at the report in the Brighton Argus and my mother was reflecting alarmedly on what she would have done if I had brought the child to her. My mother was 86. She was worried, besides, that I might be thought the child's father.

The Argus telephoned me next day and the reporter said she supposed I had saved the child's life. I said that I supposed I had, though indeed I only meant by that, that I had helped the child to live - there would have been a risk I thought, but no more, of pneumonia, and someone else would have found her in the morning. The reporter asked me if I was going to see the child, who had been named Hannah Abigail by the nurses. I said I thought so, next week. I was photographed in my cottage later and on Monday the paper made a soupy, pretty story about it with a headline - Tiny Hannah's Learned Friend - which pleased me.

On Tuesday the Sussex Express telephoned me and asked if I was going to see the child, and when, and would I be photographed with her? I said I thought I would go that day, and I didn't mind being photographed. I rang the Royal Alexandra Home for Sick Children, where the sister in charge of the ward was cautious, saying that foster parents might be coming that day, and it would be embarrassing if we met. She asked me to ring again, and I did, and she said it would be all right, but there should be no photographers, as there had been enough publicity. I told the Express this, and withheld from them the time when I should go, but they said they would try other authorities.

I got to the hospital towards six, and went up a grim, iron-railed staircase decorated with children's paintings of beings from outer space. The Sussex Express had plainly had its way with the hospital, for at the top there was a photographer waiting. A young nurse took us to a little square room, and there the child, fast asleep, was given into my arms. She was said to be restless for her evening feed, but she never opened her eyes, merely clutching automatically at my cardigan.

So I was photographed with her. The experience of what had happened only came home now. The discovery was late, lit up, dream-like, in the middle of darkness; I never clearly saw more of the child than her foot. Just the fact of her having weight, and of the meeting being in daylight so that I could see her dark hair in the evening sun, made the thing solid: in fact it stunned me.

And with that was joined something that the photographer said as he drove me to Lewes, "The hospital said it was only just in time." The foot that I saw must have been colder than I thought. As I said before, I had not thought that I had so immediately saved her life, and indeed had discouraged any drift in my mind to make too much of the event. But now a heavy feeling of responsibility and a light feeling about things being poignant and fragile and pitiable grew up - a double feeling combining in the sense that this time the dark, heavy crumbling monstrous thing - death or entropy or matter - that lies in wait for us, was cheated.

I have learnt more since - partly by newspaper accounts, partly because I was called back by the detective inspector in charge of the case for another interview. He wondered, as I learned from a friend who used to drink with him, if I was the father - so my mother was right. But, said my friend, a few moments were enough to persuade him I was innocent. I learnt that no one else heard the child, though there is a house with small children and parents geared to hear them a few feet away; that the kiosk had a broken pane, making it possible for the child to be heard, but also making her colder; that she was wrapped only in one scarf - a rather good one, with a second one to line the bag. I have often thought since, what a curious mixture of care and inadequacy there was in wrapping her, but so thinly, in leaving her sheltered, but not enough, in a place frequented but at a time no one would be likely to come before it was too late. I learnt again, weeks later, that all pre-natal clinics in the south east of England had been asked to check their records for any mother unaccounted for. And with all, no trace of the parents has been found.

I do, as it happens, think the event was providential. I do not mean that if I did not already believe in providence this event would have made me do so, but that, since I have that belief, the event fits readily to it. It is lucky for me that I do so believe, as I should otherwise at times have been seized with black terror at how many chances brought the child out alive. One is in danger of being plunged back into the world of fairytale, the world against which, it seems, much of human thought, science, theology and social organisation is built as a defence, the world where everything is arbitrary, and yet governed by unopposable laws of which we know nothing, as in The Arabian Nights where the merchant is "sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son".

I was there, a person with the vague and somewhat useless itch of benevolence, and besides an unfocused, immoderate and unsatisfied curiosity. But if I hadn't met Littlewood off the train - if I hadn't stayed so late - if I hadn't chosen to go by the police station rather than the castle - even, since there was no way of telling that the child's crying came from the kiosk rather than from the neighbouring houses unless you stood at the very spot and checked, if I hadn't been nagged by a mood to investigate rather than to take the obvious conclusion that there was a child teething in a house - if I - only I, for there was no one else - had not done any one of those four things, the child, it seems, would have died. The weight of that responsibility is awesome, and I am glad to be able to shed some of it on to the providence of God. Perhaps God guides the world, not as a man making a picture, nor as a man devises a machine, but as a man gentles a horse: and in the finding of this child one felt the gentling.

I find myself feeling that the weight of the evidence goes as Shakespeare says, and Dr Johnson glosses after him:

"...let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do fail; and that should teach us There's a divinity that shapes our ends Rough hew them how we will."

"Let us know, that is, take notice and remember, that we sometimes succeed by indiscretion, when we fail by deep plots, and infer the perpetual superintendence and agency of the Divinity. The observation is just, and will be allowed by every human being who shall reflect on the course of his own life," says Samuel Johnson.

Almost everyone I know - friends and colleagues at Sussex - responded to the event with a remark that seems to me peculiarly characteristic. Michael Jamieson called it a "Dickensian experience", and John Burrow spoke of Silas Marner. Maurice Hutt spoke of "Your wonderful experience," then two days later accosted me to say, "When I said 'wonderful' I meant also 'terrible'." Lino Pertile called it "your archetypal experience," which was almost the most just to my feelings of all comments.

It was like something much less momentous, when on the slopes above the lake of Geneva I saw the grape-picking in the vineyards for the first time: from the first moment the event seemed new and unlikely, but utterly as if it were familiar. Among the most practically benevolent people I know - the kind of people who actually adopt children, or become justices of the peace - one actually wrote to say that the event was "the one bit of unqualified good news this week". Another said almost casually that it was the only totally happy thing he had heard for two months. And when I met Cedric Watts coming across Fulton Court and called to him, "What is this lecture of yours on The End of The Waste Land?" he answered with a reference to The Winter's Tale : "O, I'm just commenting. I met with things dying, thou with things new-born."

A fortnight after the event I had the latest news of Hannah Abigail - "she is with foster parents for the time being and has settled well". And the day after that news I went to Leeds to see the Chester cycle of mystery plays. They had a real child in the Nativity play, something under a year old, the right age to sit quietly on his mother's knee, and yet be evidently immensely pleased as the shepherds offered him a bell and a bottle and a cap, and to wave his hand graciously. I leave you to judge how much for reasons hard to untangle, but easy to sympathise with, I was in tears.

Postcript A month later, my mother died of an ischaemia which began as a coldness in her foot. I will not dwell on the balancing of birth and death, except that it seemed wonderful to me that the last important event in her life should be this rescue.

Some 16 years afterwards, I was sitting reading over my dinner in Giorgio's Italian restaurant in the Cliffe - it was in the area of Lewes flooded in the year 2000, and no longer exists - when a genial, rubicund man came across to my table and asked, "Isn't your name Stephen Medcalf?" "Yes," I said, rather puzzled. "Didn't you find an abandoned baby in a telephone kiosk 16 years ago?" "Yes, I did," I said.

"Well, here she is!" he said. And there she was, a dark-haired, pleasant-looking girl, named by her adoptive parents Emma. She is now at Oxford Brookes University, studying for a job in the hospital line, which adds for me to the gladness of having found her in 1983.

© Stephen Medcalf 2002 Stephen Medcalf is Reader Emeritus in English in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex

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A Light In The Darkness

Title: A Light In The Darkness Author: Rian McMurtry Publisher: XlibrisUS ISBN: 978-1796041798 Pages: 254 Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy Reviewed by: Aly Avina

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Pacific Book Review

This tale follows Angela Fujiwara and her trials and tribulations of learning magic and necromancy, as well as the many ins and outs of this unbelievable power she is working to hone. Seth is the necromancer who saved her life and thus is teaching her his ways after she expressed her extreme interest in learning how he protected her, and even saved her from certain death. There is a large cast of characters in this book which all act as wonderful supporting characters to our heroine, Angela; all of whom have their own mystical powers they have worked hard to perfect. Angela, however, is keeping the secret of her magical lessons from her parents as well as some of her friends, which only leads to further trouble in her path to achieving the seemingly impossible.

This is a fast-paced novel that has twists and turns all throughout. Any young adult reader who is a fan of the fantasy genre would greedily consume this story as it was told with all of the mentions of magical powers including telepathy and teleportation as well as the detailed spells and incantations performed by the group Angela finds herself in during her apprenticeship with Seth and his mystical comrades. By the end of the book, Angela’s burgeoning powers will be put to the ultimate test and the climax will certainly leave you on the edge of your seat.

The writing itself showcases an author with true talent who expertly weaves their way through an entertaining and fascinating story. You immerse yourself in the characters’ world and feel as though you don’t want to leave it, which is always the sign of a truly gifted author. Don’t sleep on this book — grab your copy of A Light In The Darkness by Rian McMurtry!

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The Light in Darkness Paperback – January 1, 2009

• Print length 208 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Lawrence Kirsch Communications
• Publication date January 1, 2009
• ISBN-10 0978415612
• ISBN-13 978-0978415617
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Lawrence Kirsch Communications (January 1, 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0978415612
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0978415617
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.1 pounds
• Best Sellers Rank: #5,986,511 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

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IN LIGHT OF ALL DARKNESS

Inside the polly klaas kidnapping and the search for america's child.

by Kim Cross ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2023

A riveting tale that demonstrates the investigation's effect on solving cases even three decades later.

An in-depth account of the lengthy investigation into the 1993 abduction of 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her home in Petaluma, California.

Cross, author of What Stands in a Storm , writes, “I am the daughter-in-law of Eddie Freyer, the FBI case agent in charge of the [Klaas case],” a connection that granted the author unprecedented access. She was drawn to this project in part because of the case's significance in terms of how it used technology “at the dawn of the Internet age” and investigative skills that, as one agent told her, “changed the way the FBI does business.” Over 42 tight chapters, each as searing as the next, Cross chronologically pieces together the narratives: the knifepoint “stranger abduction” during a slumber party at Klaas’ house; reports from neighbors and police of a trespasser the same night; and forensics work of the FBI’s Evidence Response Teams (“these mavericks were initially considered rogues”) and their lifting of a partial palm print that ultimately helped to convict. The author accounts for all of the investigative angles and tactics, worthwhile and otherwise, in addition to logistics—e.g., reports being “handwritten or typed” and the challenge of a “paper-based lead-tracking system.” Word of Klaas’ disappearance spread via the news, word of mouth, and flyers. This suspenseful narrative includes the trails of clues that led to the arrest and conviction of Richard Allen Davis, who was found guilty of abducting and murdering Klaas. Cross points to the “brutal interrogation” of the victim’s two sleepover guests as “one of the biggest mistakes of the case." Despite her family’s involvement with the case, the author comes across as objective. Her credibility stems from her criticisms of systematic failures and her orchestration of innumerable personal and technical details, and she effectively humanizes the victim and others involved in the case.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023

ISBN: 9781538725061

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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UNDER THE BRIDGE

by Rebecca Godfrey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2005

A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.

Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.

The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005

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Light and Darkness

• By David J. Wolpe
• Spring 2024

Marilynne Robinson’s God makes surprising sense.

Not that her conception of God is simple. Long before Robinson published her new commentary of the book of Genesis, she and her characters were mindful of its unpredictable God. Early in her magnificent novel Gilead , for instance, the old preacher John Ames recalls a harrowing journey he took with his father through Kansas in 1892, in the midst of a drought, to find his grandfather’s grave:

There were times when I truly believed we might just wander off and die. Once when my father was gathering sticks for firewood into my arms, he said we were like Abraham and Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah. I’d thought as much myself.

Later in the book, Ames warns his own son against proofs of the biblical God: “They’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp.” Now after the three stunning, Bible-soaked novels that follow Gilead ,Robinson has given us her reflections on Genesis.

A devout reader of Calvin, and doubtless the sole instructor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who also gave Bible classes at a local church on Sunday, Robinson now gives us a picture of a God of grace that both illuminates and sometimes sits uncomfortably with the book of Genesis. For instance, after human beings try to storm the heavens at the Tower of Babel, God confuses their language, but, Robinson writes, “nothing is done to disable humankind or to deprive them of the brilliance and knowledge that make them ‘like one of us.’ The obstacles God sets to His Adam’s strange grandeur are external. This is consistent with His unvarying loyalty to His creature.”

God’s fidelity is strong and constant, and God’s forgiveness, in Robinson’s reading, is a testimony to the Deity’s deep attachment to the frail and fallible products of his work.Throughout Genesis, Robinson sees sparks of God’s goodness and grace. The book serves to “trace the workings of God’s loyalty to humankind through disgrace and failure and even crime.” Yet even in Genesis, and far more in later books of the Torah, discordances shudder through the text. There is the loving God but also the awesome and uncanny God. There is the Shabbat God, so to speak, but also the God of Yom Kippur.

“The book of Genesis” Robinson writes , “is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.” Her remark reminded me of a teaching in the Talmud from Rabbi Simlai:

The Torah begins with an act of kindness and ends with an act of kindness. It begins with God clothing the naked: “The Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them,” and it ends with Him caring for the dead: “And He [God] buried [Moses] in the Valley.” (Sotah 14a)

Setting aside, for the moment, that Rabbi Simlai was talking about the entire Torah, and Robinson is restricting herself to the book of Genesis, their framings reveal different approaches to the Bible. Adam must still leave the garden, but he will not do so naked; Moses must still die on the mountain, but he will receive what the rabbinic tradition calls the “true kindness” of a burial. Neither is forgiven their sins, and they must pay their consequences. The dictates of justice endure, albeit administered with a tender hand.

Rabbi Simlai might well say the same about the fate of Cain: Was the verdict of a life of wandering an act of forgiveness, as Robinson would have it, or one kind of leniency? As for Joseph, did he really forgive his brothers in the end? The Bible at least leaves the question open. But Robinson’s reading of this book is deeply Christian, and the idea of grace as forgiveness unearned but freely given is central to her reading of Genesis. Near the outset of her exploration, Robinson tells us, “Grace modifies law. Law cannot limit grace.” And when it comes to the brothers’ distrust of Joseph, she beautifully explains, “Grace, being apart from the calculus of deserving, is often suspect.” Joseph’s brothers cannot trust because they do not understand the workings of grace. The inexplicability of Rabbi Simlai’s God, the God of the Rabbis, is somewhat different.

There is an interesting passage in which Robinson speaks of human power and says, “We are never properly in awe of it.” In an age of AI, we can certainly accede to this. Yet it seems to me that by contrast, Robinson’s book is never fully in awe of God. By this I don’t mean to impute anything blasphemous or heretical. Hers is the biblical God of creation and redemption to be sure. But it is also the good God who made a good creation and has a benign intention for humanity. The early chapters of Genesis, she writes, establish a “profound and essential assertion of the sacred good, making pangs and toil a secondary reality.”

Yet the God of Genesis and the biblical books that follow is not only, or merely, good and loving. God is frightening, a battling God, engaged in and intertwined with dark forces that peek through the veil of creation. It is not the fallenness of man as much as the brokenness of the universe that portends evil in our world, a biblical thought that kabbalistic traditions would later make metaphysical.

Robinson is not entirely at ease with this unpredictable Being. She writes that the Abrahamic “covenant between the pieces” has “the quality of an archaic ritual.” Indeed it does, but it also reveals the overwhelming and truly terrifying aspect of a God who can neither be manipulated nor known. In the King James Version, which Robinson prefers (and helpfully appends at the end of her book), we are told that after taking the prescribed animals, splitting them in equal pieces, and laying them on the ground, night fell, and “a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him” (Gen. 15:12).

We tend to tamp down these eruptions of evil forces (all those adorable arks with animals—no depictions of corpses floating in the water). The biblical God has a plan beyond the ken of human beings, as Robinson rightly says. But there is more than mystery: a primordial terror sweeps through the text, the substratum of darkness in creation that is not a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin but of the nature of reality. The Sitra Achra of which the mystics speak, the second side of God, lies underneath the benevolence like a palimpsest.

Robinson considers the Bible “a meditation on the problem of evil,” and she rightly insists that it does not shrink from “the darkest aspects of the reality we experience.” But she is, it seems to me, ultimately interested as a great novelist in evil—that is, in the human propensity to it and what it means even for those who resist it. Although the opening assertion of her book is that “the bible is a theodicy,” she is less interested in Milton’s task of justifying “the ways of God to man” than to explore the ways of men (and women) in response.

In some ways Genesis itself invites such a humanist reading by astonishing us with its domesticity. How remarkable that a sacred book about the beginning of the world is taken up with sibling rivalry and marital discord, the very stuff of fiction. Yet Robinson’s own fiction sometimes reveals traces of that most inexplicable of all characters, the terrifying biblical God, who is cloaked in grace and goodness in this commentary.

It is something like this God whom we glimpse in the memories of John Ames, as he and his father walk together in the dusty backroads of Kansas, wondering whether they are about to reenact Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. Rereading this passage in Gilead , I was reminded of Heschel’s retelling of the boy in cheder who, each time he came to the Akedah, would again become terrified that Isaac might be sacrificed. Although his teacher admonished him—did he not know the ending?—Heschel thought that this was the proper way to read the story.

This makes sense as a reading of the biblical text even if it remains hard to make sense of such a God. As Isaiah says, speaking for this God, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isa. 45:7). Or, to quote the poet Paul Valéry, “God made everything out of nothing and sometimes the nothing shows through.”

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A sympathetic look at the rise — and stall — of gay conservatives

Neil j. young’s ‘coming out republican’ offers the history of a movement that may not have actually been that influential.

History may be written by the victors, but Neil J. Young’s excellent new book, “ Coming Out Republican ,” is a sympathetic look at one of the past century’s losers: the gay conservative. Young, a historian by training, has spent his career explaining the heterogeneity of the conservative movement. His first book, “ We Gather Together ,” was about the alliances and rivalries among Catholics, Mormons and evangelicals that birthed the Christian right, and Young has written about religion and politics for the New York Times and CNN.

“Coming Out Republican” moves from the 1950s to the present, telling the stories of the closeted operators and buttoned-up political clubs that often served as the Myrtle Wilson to the Christian right’s Daisy Buchanan, their sense of entitlement out of proportion to the way their supposed allies treated them. Sometimes these gay men acted gallantly to expand the individual freedoms of their queer countrymen. But there are also many instances in the book of them selling out the other civil rights movements in whose wake they traveled. “Coming Out Republican” is less about an interest group than a self-interest group, one that has long been unable to envision a liberation project more ambitious than expanding the sexual prerogatives of White men.

“Coming Out Republican” is at its best when using profiles of individual men to depict the eras in which they lived. Leonard Matlovich, a Vietnam War hero, came out in 1975 and sued the federal government to reenlist after he was kicked out of the military. Conservative and macho, Matlovich claimed that “everything I am and everything I hope to be I owe to the United States Air Force.” He relied on Frank Kameny, of the gay advocacy group the Mattachine Society, and a lawyer from the ACLU to sue on his behalf. Appearing on the cover of Time magazine, he had a dark mustache from central casting, but he was an imperfect poster boy, all-American but naive about gay life. He once bashfully asked a reporter from the Advocate — an eminent gay magazine — what the publication was.

In his study of Matlovich, Young deftly, if a little dryly, parses the cross currents of imperialism, respectability and internecine gay resentment. His prose is at times as vanilla as the men he writes about, relying on ventriloquism of vulgar gay patois for color. In other illuminating sketches, we meet figures such as Jon Hinson, the Bible-thumping congressman from Mississippi who resigned after getting caught performing oral sex on a Black Library of Congress technician in a bathroom in the Capitol, and Terry Dolan, Ronald Reagan’s whiz kid pollster who bragged about purging moderates from Congress, bulldozing a path for the Christian right’s ascension in the 1980s. They are but two of the legions of closeted Republicans who believed in privacy for a man’s sex life but not, among other things, a woman’s right to an abortion . Young takes so much care describing the different ways Matlovich, Hinson and Dolan conceived of themselves, and the roles they played in the politics of their era, that their deaths feel like a gut-punch. Each one died of AIDS.

Less successful are Young’s sections on gay Republican groups — the Log Cabin Republicans, the Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club, the Lincoln Republican Club, Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, GOProud — whose sheer number of names reflects how often they split off from one another. Most of the book’s colorful characters were better at acting out and working covertly than they were at building large coalitions, so the stakes of their collective action — like persuading a few thousand San Francisco Republicans to oppose a California ballot initiative — feel low.

Young also has the credulous habit of, for example, describing a group whose membership “doubled that year to over 150” and citing the growth as evidence of its strength, when such crowds would barely match a modest gay bar’s Saturday night or a Baptist church’s Sunday services. In instances when gay Republican groups have wielded influence in a decisive way — say, by whipping up a handful of votes to pass civil rights protections in the California legislature and marriage equality in the New York legislature — it is not because they had power that could not be ignored. It is because in the eyes of Republican lawmakers in very liberal states, gay Republicans could, like a mistress that doesn’t ask or expect too much, be indulged from time to time.

But that’s state politics. At the national level, gay Republicans have been betrayed and insulted by every Republican presidential candidate since Reagan. In 1980, they had reasons for optimism. Despite Reagan’s conservative bona fides, two years earlier he helped defeat a California referendum that would have barred gay people from teaching in public schools. But as president, his embrace of the religious right was so close, and his administration’s antipathy for people with AIDS so pronounced, that it further stained the Republican Party’s reputation with gay people. George H.W. Bush ran as a moderate and even signed gay-friendly legislation like the Ryan White Care Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act before abandoning tolerance to court the religious right. Less than a decade after he left office, his son campaigned as a compassionate conservative, and then ran for reelection supporting a constitutional amendment to forbid same-sex marriage. Donald Trump also seemed to embrace LGBTQ people as he campaigned for the 2016 election, but as president he nominated judges hostile to LGBTQ rights and supported policies that made it easier for people claiming religious exemptions to discriminate against sexual minorities.

Young makes a persuasive case that gay Republicans contributed to the civil rights progress of the last few decades. Intellectuals like Andrew Sullivan and operators like Ken Mehlman, who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign from the closet, contributed to the push for marriage equality and military participation. But neither man — or really any conservative advocate — did nearly as much as Evan Wolfson, the Lambda Legal lawyer, who articulated the intellectual foundations of same-sex marriage and executed the political strategy to make it a reality. The simple fact is that liberal gays have been more clear-eyed about power than their conservative counterparts, better at building coalitions and more wary of placating the Christian conservatives who do not believe there is a place for sexual minorities in public life.

Young could have more forcefully thought through the reluctance of gay Republicans to find common cause with members of other minority groups. The obvious answer is the most uncomfortable one: Gay Republicans see themselves as having more in common with other White people, rich people and men. Unfortunately, the only way that the numerically few can wield power is through solidarity with other minorities, but that requires insight that does not always come easily to White gay men, especially conservative White gay men: None of us is that special, and trying to be “not that kind of gay” comes at a cost. One of the most heartbreaking themes of “Coming Out Republican” is how unfamiliar many conservative gays are with the varying joys of gay life — writing it off as too “PC” or too promiscuous. Being gay can be quite fun, not despite but because of our endless squabbles and struggles over how to keep this life distinct and ours, and open to as many people as want to partake.

Anyone could benefit from reading this book. Straight people will learn how the puritanical impulse to control other people’s ’ sex lives has defined politics for nearly a century, an impulse as old as it is futile. Queer people — who often must teach ourselves our own history — will learn how respectability remains an empty promise. But it is gay Republicans themselves who most need to read Young’s book. If they are not too vain, the Peter Thiels and George Santoses of the world might find in these pages a warning that having power is not the same thing as being tolerated until you are no longer useful.

Nathan Kohrman is a writer covering medicine, politics and culture. Based in New York, he is an incoming general surgery resident at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Coming Out Republican

A History of the Gay Right

By Neil J. Young

University of Chicago Press. 441 pp. $29.99

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Protecting the Darkness in Chile’s Atacama Desert

Light pollution is threatening the future of astronomy. can a new nationwide lighting standard make a difference.

Top: A view of the Milky Way from NSF’s NOIRLab Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, located at the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert. Visual: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský

G rowing up in Chile’s Atacama Desert, Paulina Villalobos thought the Milky Way’s presence in the pristine starry skies was a given. Her father, an amateur astronomer, would wake her when a comet crossed the night sky. But Villalobos later moved to Santiago, the capital, to study architecture. There, the stars disappeared amid a haze of city lights. Just like people who come from the coast miss the ocean, she said, “I missed the sky.”

The extraordinary darkness that sheaths the Atacama, which stretches for hundreds of miles in Chile’s north, has made it a haven for astronomers searching for planets and stars shimmering in the night sky. With its high altitude and clear skies, the region is repeatedly chosen as a site for observatories. According to some estimates , by 2030, Chile will be home to around 70 percent of the world’s astronomical infrastructure.

Yet even here, skyglow from hundreds of miles away can overwhelm the faint light emanating from astronomical objects.

Now, a new regulation aims to darken the night skies.

In October, the Chilean government announced a new National Lighting Standard that will become effective later this year. The updated standards expand restrictions on light luminosity, color, and the hours they can be turned on to protect three major concerns: astronomy, biodiversity, and human health.

According to some estimates, by 2030, Chile will be home to around 70 percent of the world’s astronomical infrastructure.

For astronomers, the stakes can feel high. While the Atacama offers a window to answer fundamental questions about the origin of life, that window is at risk of closing in the next 50 years due to increasing light pollution, said Chilean astronomer Guillermo Blanc. Worldwide, the sky is estimated to get brighter by 10 percent on average each year.

The new rule on light pollution in Chile was informed, in part, by a technical advisory committee, which included astronomers and other scientists — Villalobos, who is now an architect and lighting designer, among them. The new regulation, she said, offers “the possibility of recovering the sky.”

S ince the 1960s, the Atacama Desert has been an important hub for international astronomy. Today, the region, which boasts more than 300 clear nights per year, hosts some of the world’s most significant observatories, including the internationally funded Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the European Southern Observatory, the latter of which is currently developing the Extremely Large Telescope , set to open in 2028.

NOIRLab, a United States government-funded program, also operates two facilities in the Atacama. The National Science Foundation has invested more than $500 million to build a third facility, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is expected to see first light later in 2025. Yet it too is threatened by light pollution, said Blanc, who works at the Las Campanas Observatory.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory aims to conduct a 10-year survey of the Southern Hemisphere sky to understand dark matter and energy, take an inventory of the solar system, and map the Milky Way. But in recent years, mining operations and urban development in the area have increased ambient brightness.

These telescopes are being built to operate for 50 or even 100 years, but “the outlook today is very worrisome in 20, 30, 40 years,” Blanc said.

Those problems are global; worldwide, two-thirds of major professional observatories are affected by levels of light pollution that exceed the expected natural levels, according to a 2023 review . While many observations now take place from telescopes orbiting Earth, ground-based telescopes are still essential to interpret observations from those space-based telescopes. And if the sky’s natural brightness increases, it’s harder to observe faint objects, such as distant galaxies forming on the far edge of the universe or gas orbiting around black holes.

Some observations will require more time — and greater investment: “If you have to spend two nights instead of one night to observe a faint thing because the sky is now artificially brighter, that costs money,” said James Lowenthal, a professor of astronomy at Smith College who also leads the Light Pollution subcommittee for the American Astronomical Society. “We’re talking literally billions of dollars at stake — at least tens of millions of dollars.”

“The outlook today is very worrisome in 20, 30, 40 years.”

Others might become impossible without better technology: “We are directly cutting the possibility of seeing certain phenomena,” said Rodolfo Angeloni, an assistant scientist at NOIRLab’s Gemini Observatory Southern Operations Center who studies stellar astrophysics and the effects of light pollution on the Chilean sky. “If a sky reaches a certain threshold of brightness, the telescopes installed in the area are simply no longer able to do frontier research.”

He cited the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where the Milky Way galaxy was first measured, as an example. The extraordinary growth of Los Angeles brought significant levels of light pollution. Today, observatories in California have to work with a brightness in the sky that was previously nonexistent.

Chile, however, has other plans.

C hile’s new regulation on light pollution builds upon a previous rule that only protected certain key astronomical sites. The new regulation, in contrast, will apply nationwide. Its aim is not to blackout La Serena or Santiago, some of Chile’s major cities, but to use specific lighting to reduce negative effects.

In 2019, when the Ministry of the Environment began revising the regulation, Chile took a step towards addressing the problem by incorporating light as a legal pollutant. Over 83 percent of the world’s population lives under light-saturated skies, but light is not normally seen — and legislated — as pollution. Many advocates say that it should be.

The sky “is as polluted as, for example, a river that is full of garbage. It’s as polluted as living next to a factory,” said Felipe Loaiza Arias, who works for Chile’s Ministry of the Environment and helped craft the legislation.

The 2023 regulation also recognized that astronomy is not all that’s at risk. Two other focuses were incorporated: biodiversity and human health. Reduced artificial light could aid migrating seabirds , like Markham’s storm-petrel that nests in the Atacama Desert; thousands die each year because of city lights, putting them at risk of extinction. And light pollution also interferes with the circadian rhythm of humans and other species.

The restrictions apply to all outdoor lighting, from the small-scale, such as streetlights, to the large, like mining facilities. Lamps cannot be directed towards the upper hemisphere, and the law regulates their luminosity and color spectrum. Lighting can emit no more than 7 percent of blue light, and in Special Protection Areas, which include astronomical sites and protected areas for biodiversity, it’s limited to just 1 percent.

But there is a major constraint that Blanc and Angeloni agreed on: oversight. Does Chile have the resources to oversee correct lighting all over the country? Loaiza Arias recognized it as a challenge. These types of regulations are massive and ambitious in terms of the sources of light they regulate, Loaiza Arias explained. And because the regulation has limited application when it comes to lights that are already installed, the measures, he said, are more so preventive.

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For some people, like Villalobos, more work could be done. Although the regulation is positive, she said, it only oversees individual lights and overlooks the collective light pollution from a facility. If people were aware of light pollution, she says, the issue might be easier to tackle.

Often, urban dwellers are not aware of how over-illuminated their cities are. The use of lighting that is brighter than needed, or turned on at unessential times, has caused a widespread global fog of light. According to one 2016 study , an estimated one-third of the world population cannot see the Milky Way, including 60 percent of Europeans and nearly 80 percent of North Americans.

A lthough Chile’s new lighting standard is one of the first of its kind in South America, and perhaps even the world, Loaiza Arias believes it is not immediately replicable: Chile recognizes how important astronomy is, both for science and the country’s economy, he said, but another country might have different priorities.

“Chile is showing us the way to how to do this in a sort of holistic fashion,” said Richard Green, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, who has studied dark skies for over 30 years and used to travel to the Atacama as part of his work at the U.S. National Observatory.

Lowenthal, the Smith College astronomer, wonders how other countries could replicate the regulation. Lowenthal believes that the night sky should also be protected, like air and water that are federally regulated under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, respectively. For him, the question is: What will it take for the night sky to be recognized as an essential part of the environment?

“Chile is showing us the way to how to do this in a sort of holistic fashion.”

Beyond the consequences for astronomy, the night sky is a heritage and a connection to our human past , Lowenthal added: From Chile to the American Southwest, to Indonesia and Hawai’i, people have deeply understood the sky. Addressing light pollution, he said, is about maintaining that connection.

Villalobos eventually returned to the Atacama and Chile after years abroad studying light. She now sits on the International Committee of DarkSky International, a nonprofit that aims to protect and conserve the night sky. The Atacama Desert, to her, is more than just home to some of the world’s biggest observatories; here, people can experience the awe of the night sky once more.

In the Atacama, Villalobos said, “there’s nothing between you and the universe.”

Note: Numerous interviews for this story were conducted originally in Spanish, and subsequently translated to English.

Alexa Robles-Gil is a Mexican science journalist based in New York City. She’s a contributing writer for the Chilean magazine Endémico.

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