The E-reader: Reviews Of E-books

Eight hundred million people in 86 countries, roughly 1 in every 8 human beings on Earth, is at risk from volcanic eruptions. By far the most vulnerable country is Indonesia, where 77 active mountains sit near cities and towns. In this riveting and informative investigative piece, Marc Herman zeroes in on one of the country’s most active and dangerous volcanoes, Mount Marapi, offering a geological history of the region, a harrowing account of the mountain’s devastating 2006 eruption and a portrait of the “Wizard of Marapi,” M’bah Marijdan. “His daily duties included reading the volcano’s moods and appeasing its gods using techniques he learned from his father, the previous wizard,” Herman writes, and for his trouble the Javanese monarchy paid him the equivalent of 80 cents a month. Soon after the initial eruption in 2006, Marijdan defied authorities and refused to leave the village, predicting that a magical rock on the outskirts of town would serve “as a metaphysical sentry” and deflect any debris. Among the achievements of this excellent piece is the way Herman’s skepticism of the wizard, who at first seems an almost comic figure, dissolves into a guarded belief, then turns once more back to equivocal doubt. Though he didn’t know it, U2 front man Bono’s life was in danger in January 2012 when he arrived in Timbuktu, Mali, for a concert series called the Festival of the Desert. The concert’s founder, Mohamed Aly Ansar, knew that in recent years radical Islam had taken hold among the Tuareg, a group of Saharan nomads that had a long history of challenging the government. Ansar’s former friend Iyad Ag Ghali, who once helped inspire the concert, now led the rebel forces and had turned against the music that once united the country. Hammer traces the Tuaregs’ hatred of the government back to the end of the 19th century and the French colonial occupation of its homeland in the central Sahara, shows the influence Moammar Khadafy had on the rebels a hundred years later and offers a nuanced portrait of Ghali, who in spite of his fervid devotion to the cause has a strong desire for peace. At the headlining event, Bono takes the stage with Tinariwen, a “desert blues” band made up of former Tuareg rebels. Though he makes it through the festival without incident, the strong storytelling and fascinating backdrop make us hold our breath the whole way through. In her first in a series of personal essays on grief, illness and food, novelist Ellis Avery writes about her mother’s death of an aneurysm at age 68 and the emotional aftermath of going through and selling her things. Elaine Solari Atwood was a bright law school graduate but after having children and enduring a loveless marriage, she turned increasingly to alcohol. The collection becomes Avery’s inheritance, and we follow her into New York’s Diamond District to sell several dozen gold pieces for a few thousand dollars, enough to buy her a little writing time. In one of the essay’s most wrenching scenes, she watches a jeweler crush one of her mother’s teeth for its gold fillings. Novelist Carrie Brown’s short story “Witness” is a classic tale of forbidden love, a Romeo and Juliet for the current moment. Hector is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador living in a squalid three-bedroom apartment that he shares with as many as 10 housemates at a time. Azmina is the private school-educated daughter of an Iraqi diplomat whose family all has citizenship: “Someone had snapped his fingers,” Brown writes, “and boom, six citizenship papers had been delivered.” Hector and Azmina both work at St.