Book Review

Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry into Family Secrets

I thought writing this review would be an easy assignment to complete. After all, I’ve known Chris Poulos since I hired him out of his PhD program to be an assistant professor in a department I then chaired. Too, I knew a thing or two about family secrets, having spent the better part of five years researching and writing about my own. And I’ve read and admired his previous ethnographic work.

Like I said, I thought it would be easy. Knock it out in a weekend easy.

It has not been easy. And the work has added up to a lot more than a weekend. Why? Describing why that is the case, in fact, is the nature of this particular narrative problem. It is the problem—albeit a happy one—of explaining what hasn’t been easy.

Book Review

Cancer and Death:
A love story in two voices

This is the story of two fine human beings—Leah Vande Berg and Nick Trujillo—who had crazy good and mostly happy childhoods, who were, like all of us, occasionally troubled by unrealized dreams and love and loss, but nevertheless lived full lives before they ever met each other.

And then it becomes a story of a crazy happy marriage, occasionally troubled, like all of us are, by big choices and careers and families.

Then something happens and the story changes. One otherwise ordinary California day ovarian cancer entered their lives, rudely interrupting it and the happy story they had lived and worked hard for and imagined as their future together. This cancer brought with it a certain diagnosis of death, the only real medical question was how long Leah had yet to live. Chemotherapy was prescribed on the promise of possibly lengthening what was left of her life, and maybe it did. But inevitably the end came for lovely, intelligent, accomplished Leah Vande Berg at the still youthful age of 55.

This week the big news is the midterm election and there are two competing narratives worth examining. Today, in advance of the vote, I want to use my ethnographic and rhetorical training by loosely applying to them Clifford Geertz’s textual methods for uncovering organizing principles in cultural stories and Walter Fisher’s well-worn criteria for evaluating narratives, namely, do they “hang together” and do they “ring true?”

"The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble." –Barry Hannah

Later on this afternoon I will enter my graduate seminar in “Narrative Theories and Knowing” and read aloud from the collected works of Barry Hannah. Those of you who have read his work—from the brilliant early novel Geronimo Rex through the remarkable novella Ray and ending up with the magnificent posthumous collection out just last year Long, Last, Happy—chances are good that my selection of his short story “Water Liars” for a reading will come as no surprise. For those of you who do not recognize his name, believe me, opening up one of his texts will change forever how you read and think about the power of literature. For those of you who write, opening up one of Barry’s texts will likely cause you to have the same reaction Richard Ford had when he first read him:

“Writing about them, to me, often felt like that children’s game where you try to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time: trying simultaneously to be like them and yet fiercely to defend whatever scrap of no-man’s land remains between them and you—between the real world and the world of science.”

 

Be honest: When was the last time you truly enjoyed reading a book, any book, written by an academic?  When was the last time you found yourself completely absorbed in a remarkable story?

What if I told you that the academic book in question is a full-out adventure story cleverly disguised as an organizational ethnography, and that it’s subject is a high performance athletic team made up of Cambridge University graduate students, volunteers who train at the outer limits of human endurance for 200 days to qualify for an 8-person Boat Race against their arch rival, Oxford?  A Boat Race that, if they are lucky and their highly coordinated talents are literally perfect, will last just under 17 minutes but will bring with their victory a kind of immortality?  Would you want to read such book?