Books
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Susanne Antonetta Though the Mommy Lit-and even the Adoption Mommy Lit-category is a crowded one, Antonetta’s new memoir, Make Me a Mother (Norton, $18.90), manages to stake a solid place on the shelves. The Bellingham writer’s account of adopting a Korean baby boy is filled with the anxieties, setbacks, and joys common to this kind of story, yet is remarkable in its erudite examination of the word “adoption” itself. She also explores the rich history-from the Romans to the early American West-behind the practice of caring for a child not biologically your own. Also unique to the book: her bucking of the assumption that parents who adopt do so largely because of the inability to conceive. As Antonetta and her husband go from loving Jin to being in love with him, she gets immersed in her own eccentric family history-and finds herself becoming a mother to not just her adopted child, but to the aging parents with whom she’s
had a deeply conflicted relationship. Make Me a Mother is an unflinching, deeply honest, and impeccably researched read that should appeal to all parents. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, . Free. 7 p.m. NICOLE SPRINKLE University Book Store Free Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 7pm
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Elizabeth Kolbert In the long run, we’ll all be dead. That’s just one of the takeaways from Kolbert’s latest eco-disaster tome, mostly adapted from her reporting in The New Yorker, where she’s assigned to what I call the-Earth-is-going-to-hell beat. And yet she’ll find a receptive, well-scienced Seattle audience for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, $28), no creationists or climate-change deniers in the crowd. The double appeal to her globe-trotting dispatches-in which she follows field scientists from Iceland to Peru-allows us both the vicarious pleasure of traveling with her and the grim confirmation that, yes, we’re heating up the planet enough to ensure our own future demise. None of us will personally be here to experience it, of course, only the heirs to our selfish genome. Extinction, Kolbert reports, is cyclical: Species diversity has peaked and crashed five times before, according to the fossil record, with causes including ice ages and meteor strikes. Our present peril is man-made, of course, as Kolbert also explored in her 2006 Field Notes From a Catastrophe. (Again: She, and we, just can’t get enough of the disaster stuff.) Whether human civilization finally ends with a bang or
a whimper ultimately doesn’t matter so much as the diagnosis here. What makes Kolbert’s latest book-and its recent companions, like Guns, Germs, and Steel and The World Without Us-so fascinating to us morbid rationalists isn’t exactly schadenfreude; it’s more like attending our own funerals. This is how it will all end, says Kolbert, as we clever humans systematically engineer our own erasure-along with most other species-and leave the Earth in the capable paws of rats, ants, fungi, and other more-deserving survivors. BRIAN MILLER Town Hall $5 Friday, February 21, 2014, 7:30pm
