Reviews of New Books

DESTINATION MARS
By Frederick Turner

The Case for Mars
By Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner; The Free Press, 250 pages, $25

The recent discovery that life probably existed on Mars holds a number of stunning implications. One is that life may be common in the universe—that wide green planets, their plains and hills and oceans teeming with activity, may lie waiting for us under the light of alien suns. Another, scarcely whispered yet, is that since Mars’ climate and geology seem to have started evolving more quickly than Earth’s, the germs of Earthly life may have originated on Mars and been carried to our planet inside a meteorite, as the dead fossils were. Thus we would all turn out to be Martians, and to go to Mars would be to go home. A third implication—and this contains profound moral and economic significance—is that if life once existed on Mars, it could again, and we might earn for our generation the eternal fame of having brought a dead planet back to life.

With admirable clarity, The Case for Mars lays out a workable plan for sending a cheap and relatively safe expedition to the surface of that planet and establishing permanent settlements there. Depending upon our actions, this will be seen either as one of our civilization’s rallying points after the moral exhaustion of the Cold War and the collapse of socialism, a moment when we dedicated ourselves to a task worthy of a democratic nation, or as a bitter sign that we had abandoned the glory road of the human spirit.

Robert Zubrin is a true engineering genius, like the heroic engineers of the past: Telford, Corliss, Piccard, Carnot, Eiffel, Steinmetz, Diesel, Brunel. But unlike them, he is alive and working on the private side of the space industry at what must be for him a frustrating time. nasa’s 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, advocated by George Bush and overseen by Vice President Quayle (whose much-ridiculed remark about life on Mars may not have been as silly as it sounded), would have cost $450 billion; it died a fitting death on the budget-cutting table. It was essentially a way for big technology companies to get the government to pay for fancy borderline research and hire huge staffs of salary-boosting subordinates. Zubrin’s plan has the supreme elegance of all great ideas, and its elegance shows in its price tag: a mere $30 to $60 billion spread over a decade. Its technology is not state-of-the-art. Indeed, Zubrin delights in pointing out how the basic chemical processes he proposes to use were invented by bewhiskered nineteenth-century Germans and used in Victorian factories, and how he and his colleagues created a demonstration project on Mars refueling, working with mail-order components and a budget less than the cost of a luxury automobile.

Essentially he proposes to refuel on Mars (the second safest place in the solar system, as he rightly calls it) before the explorers even leave Earth. Two years before the human crew takes off, a robot base lands on Mars, carrying a small payload of hydrogen, a power plant, life support systems, a pressurized light truck for transportation, a habitation for human beings, and a vehicle to return the astronauts to Earth. Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere is sucked into a childishly simple chemical device, and reacted with the hydrogen to make methane (a potent rocket fuel) and water. Some of the water is kept for the future dwellers’ uses; the rest is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is recycled back into the fuel-creating system, and the oxygen is stored as the oxidant for the methane and as the breathable atmosphere of the habitation. Zubrin, in other words, has found a way to use the miracle element carbon in the way that life all over Earth uses it, as the essential lever to tweak other elements into doing what one wants.

When the base, with a theoretically unlimited life-support capacity, is ready, the crew, together with a second complete habitation, a return vehicle, a truck, and a refueling system, land on Mars. Crew members will be able to spend several months there in relative comfort, protected from space radiation by Mars’ atmosphere, and to explore the surface and prepare for the next group. Zubrin’s plans for the further settlement of Mars are equally elegant. Mars’ climate, he shows, is ready to be nudged by modest human efforts into a runaway greenhouse effect, giving the planet a warm thick atmosphere, water running on the surface, and all the ingredients for flourishing bacteria and plants.

Zubrin’s economic ingenuity is no less remarkable. He proposes that the nation offer money prizes to the first private corporations achieving the technological goals that will add up to a successful Mars expedition. This idea neatly relieves the government of liability, bypasses the bureaucracy, rewards companies for saving money, not spending it, and invokes the creative genie of competition.

Can we muster the courage and vision to take up Zubrin’s challenge? The Cold War and the nuclear threat got us into the habit of timorously cowering at the prospect of any great action. This is the most cowardly period in world history. Our brave youth, without a grand vision to provide national dignity, are reduced to gang wars and political whining, their human capacity for self-sacrifice wasted on issues of "lifestyle." Get a grip, America. Put Robert Zubrin in charge.

The poet Frederick Turner has been advocating Mars exploration for many years. His epic poem, Genesis, describes the future terraforming of the red planet.

UP ON MAIN STREET
By Philip Langdon

Home From Nowhere: Remaking
Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
By James Howard Kunstler;
Simon & Schuster, 319 pages, $24

When I opened James Howard Kunstler’s first nonfiction book four years ago, the irascible, bombastic tone of his descriptions immediately put me off. About the time that I got to his fulmination against Long Island houses with their look of "slackjawed cretinism," I made a final grimace, put The Geography of Nowhere back on the bookstore shelf, and told myself this isn’t writing, this is ranting.

But something has happened to Kunstler, and I think I understand what it is. The Geography of Nowhere—despite its shrillness, or perhaps because of it—put him on the map as a national commentator. It brought him invitations to speak, opportunities to see more of the country, chances to talk at length with critics of conventional development, and, best of all, the impetus to take his sandpaper-coarse sarcasm and refine it into language more consistently on target. Last spring the tightly wound free-lance writer from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., announced to an anti-sprawl conference in Connecticut that his aim is to revive the art of rhetoric, and I watched as he proceeded, for 60 riveting minutes, to regale his audience with a passionate attack on everything that is making America an uglier, less civic-minded society. The formidable skill Kunstler has developed on the lecture circuit has given him, in Home From Nowhere, an expressive power that’s hard to surpass. This is one of those rare cases in which the sequel outshines the original.

The new volume presents a first-rate analysis of the built environment and how it contributes to the despoliation of American culture. Kunstler ties together many aspects of the "clownishness" in current society—the goofy way that people dress, the throwaway buildings we erect, the shallowness of much of our public discourse—and indicts the present state of our civilization.

Dignified architecture plays a cardinal role in any self-respecting civilization, and Kunstler argues that in recent decades the preponderance of American buildings (reflecting the low standards of their owners, developers, and designers) have behaved as if they had been relieved of all responsibilities for promoting the common good. He emphasizes the importance of public settings. "It matters," says Kunstler, "that the junior high school looks like a fertilizer factory, that the town hall looks like a wholesale beverage warehouse, that the library looks like a shipping container, and that a hotel looks like a medium security prison...these buildings dishonor the public realm as they dishonor their institutional roles in our lives, and in their design they make civic life impossible."

It is not simply that buildings should adopt more appropriate styles and materials. It is that buildings need to be arranged in such a way that they create places where people of different classes, backgrounds, and walks of life feel comfortable coming together, subject to the norms that support civilized give-and-take. In this regard, Kunstler praises the traditions that prevailed until about 1945—the uncomplicated traditions, for instance, that gave us Main Street, a public arena in which anyone who conducted himself with due regard for others was welcome to participate. "The pattern of Main Street," Kunstler writes, "is pretty simple: mixed use, mixed income, apartments and offices over the stores, moderate density, scaled to pedestrians, vehicles permitted but not allowed to dominate, buildings detailed with care, and built to last (though we still trashed it). Altogether, it was a pretty good development pattern. It produced places that people loved deeply."

Kunstler’s prescriptions for community planning reflect the design movement known as New Urbanism, which emphasizes the ability to walk to most of the essentials of daily life, the importance of public gathering places and respectable civic architecture, and an end to the practice of designing buildings as if it’s okay to dispose of them in a few years and erect something equally crass and insubstantial in their place. Arguing for communities where school and home are part of a lively mix of buildings and activities, Kunstler writes, "Without the underpinning of genuine community and its institutions, family life has predictably disintegrated, because the family alone cannot bear all the burdens and perform all the functions of itself and the community…. Children cannot acquire social skills unless they circulate in a real community among a variety of honorably occupied adults, not necessarily their parents, and are subject to the teachings and restraints of all such adults."

For those who have followed New Urbanism closely, there are not a lot of surprises here, though I found some intriguing nuggets, such as Kunstler’s assertion that horizontal windows are inherently undignified, signaling man reclining, whereas vertical windows represent human beings in the upright, a proper profile to display to the world. Despite occasional rough patches where he resorts to four-letter vulgarities, he comes up with countless utterances so pungent you want to recite them to everyone within earshot. Kunstler has the tartness and timing of a stand-up comic, so his complaints about American life often end up being as hilarious as they are damning.

Unlike many writers in this field, Kunstler is never gulled into praising projects and programs that have good intentions but dubious results. He is a truth-teller, stepping on the toes of liberals one moment, conservatives the next, with a frankness that makes an inspiring contrast to the risk-avoiding conventions of the journalism trade. His discussion of race and the cities is one of the best I’ve read.

Home from Nowhere, with its principled anger and its joy of righteous battle, is a book much needed just now.

Associate editor Philip Langdon is author of A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb.

SOME LIKE HIM NOT
By Jesse Walker

Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder
By Kevin Lally; Henry Holt,
496 pages, $30

Eight pages into Wilder Times, author Kevin Lally tells the story of Ilse, the young whore with whom future movie maker Billy Wilder had an affair at age 18. For Maurice Zolotow, author of the 1977 biography Billy Wilder in Hollywood, Wilder’s discovery that Ilse was a lady of the night was (in Lally’s words) "the central moment in Wilder’s life, the Rosebud" that drove him to drop out of college, adopt his famous cynicism, and populate his pictures with prostitutes.

Lally reports this theory, then deftly deflates it with Wilder’s side of the story: "I knew the girl to be a hooker. She was very pretty, and I paid her."

Therein lies the strength of Lally’s account. The author is a workmanlike journalist without grand ambition, always aware that he is unlikely to unlock the secrets of his subject’s soul, and therefore content to save his analysis for discussions of Wilder’s movies.

In another man’s biography, this might make for dry and dull reading—and the last chapter of this book, mostly given over to listing awards and accolades the director has received in his retirement, is just that. But Wilder is as famous for his wit as for his art, and few pages go by without an entertaining anecdote or one-liner. Thus shorn of pretentious psychohistory, Lally’s book, while hardly a great literary achievement, is a solid guide to a great film maker’s legacy.

Samuel "Billie" Wilder was born in 1906 in Sucha, a town ruled then by Austria-Hungary and today by Poland. He first distinguished himself as a journalist, writing for papers in Vienna and then Berlin, where he caused a stir with a four-part account of the two months he spent working as a gigolo. He began writing screenplays for German B movies, initially without screen credit; he also co-wrote People on Sunday, a well-received "art" film. He fled Germany when Hitler came to power, traveling first to France and then to the U.S. Barely able to speak the language, he nonetheless landed a job as a studio screenwriter, and within a few years was writing some of the best Hollywood pictures of the day, most in collaboration with Charles Brackett: Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn, Ball of Fire.

With The Major and the Minor, Wilder became one of the first writers within the studio system allowed to direct his own scripts. The films that followed include some of the finest ever made: Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment. Wilder’s movies are, as Otto Friedrich wrote in City of Nets, "hard and cynical, dedicated to the proposition that every man had his price, and every woman too"; their plots characteristically turn on exploitation, deception, and masquerade. They are also bitterly comic, shot through with the dark wit of a man who lost family to the Holocaust. This humor appears without regard for genre: Double Indemnity, a seminal noir thriller, displays dialogue far funnier than most self-proclaimed comedies.

Like any other film maker, Wilder produced the occasional dud (The Emperor Waltz, Buddy Buddy). By and large, though, he has created as excellent a body of work as any other director—arguably the best to emerge from the studio system.

Many will not share this judgment. The problem is not that Wilder was too much entertainer and too little artist; today, with traditional distinctions between "high" and "low" culture all but erased, that almost counts in his favor. The problem is Wilder’s world view. Lally notes that Wilder has traditionally been attacked from two different directions. Some critics are dismayed by his trademark cynicism and his attraction to seamy subjects. Others accuse him of inconsistency, noting that for all the "dark" elements of Wilder’s films—"disreputable and unsympathetic lead characters, startling gallows humor, a blistering view of the human condition"—his movies usually have happy endings, "often with an anti-hero learning a devastating moral lesson." In other words, Wilder has offended the two greatest collections of killjoys in the critical establishment: the straight-laced who decry any irreverent look at the underside of life, and the world-saving pessimists who cannot understand how any human bonds can form in a society so filled with exploitation and abuse.

Well, don’t let the ninnies spoil your fun. Wilder’s movies are far more entertaining than most of the slop available at the local video store. And his unattractive heroes and moral gray areas offer something more substantial than the average "quality" Hollywood picture. The social commentary in The Apartment is far sharper than anything in the heavy-handed message-movies that too many critics love to cheer, from Gentleman’s Agreement to Quiz Show.

Today, his career behind him, Wilder is almost universally praised. But it’s hard to find much evidence that the larger lesson has been learned. The critics who dismissed Wilder’s best work may be gone, but their spirit lives on.

Jesse Walker is a Seattle-based writer.

ROCKY’S ROAD
By Clark Stooksbury

The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller
By Cary Reich;
Doubleday, 875 pages, $35

Nelson Rockefeller was the symbol of a type of liberal Republican that in recent years was assumed to be extinct. Colin Powell became perhaps this decade’s only self-professed "Rockefeller Republican" when he briefly preened before TV cameras in the fall of 1995 before forsaking electoral politics for the call of the lecture circuit.

Rockefeller himself had the misfortune to begin his career as a presidential candidate when the power base of the Republican party was shifting geographically to the West and ideologically to the right. He was unsuccessful in his quests for the Republican nomination in the 1960s, but in a bizarre moment in American political history, ascended to the Vice Presidency in 1975 courtesy of President Ford and the U.S. Congress.

As one who bore a name with multiple connotations and spent much of his life on the public’s business, Rockefeller merits a substantial biography, and financial journalist Cary Reich spent nearly a decade on the task. This massive volume, which will be joined by a second volume in 1998, concludes in 1958, right after its subject was elected governor of New York. The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller is the result of copious research and dozens of interviews with family members and associates—and what a record the author had to work from. At an age when many men are working in the mail room or peeling potatoes in the Army, Nelson was building an empire. It is amazing what you can accomplish with drive, intelligence, and determination—backed by Grandpa’s millions.

Reich, who focuses on the wealthy and powerful, must believe that everything they do is fascinating. Thus the reader is treated to many anecdotes we could probably stand to avoid. Is it any surprise that Nelson Rockefeller had a "special relationship" with president Ernest Hopkins while a student at Dartmouth? Or that the Rockefeller family was a major Dartmouth donor? At other times, Reich provides detailed accounts of genuinely captivating events, as when telling of the ill-fated Diego Rivera mural that was to have decorated the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It seems that Rockefeller’s patrons were unperturbed when the Communist Rivera included scenes of "Moscow May Day marchers, the gas masks and death ray, the venereal-disease germs hovering over card-playing, gin-swilling society ladies." But when the artist refused to remove an image of Lenin from the mural, he was told his services were no longer needed. He returned to Mexico City $21,500 richer and denounced, perhaps with some justification, the destruction of his mural as an act of "cultural vandalism."

Sensibly, Rockefeller’s political career is the major focus of Reich’s work. These sections tell of Rocky’s involvement with many of the major and minor players of the era, among them perennial Republican Presidential non-contender Harold Stassen and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The Brooklyn-born Reich managed to raise my Volunteer State ire by repeatedly referring to the Tennessean Hull as some sort of shoeless hayseed.

Rockefeller began his federal career during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt as the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. In that position and later as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs, he exercised major influence on policy in the region and became a celebrity in Latin America. Rockefeller’s efforts resulted in a tepid Argentinean declaration of war against the Axis powers in early 1945, and in the creation of U.N. Article 51, which allowed for regional alliances such as nato. For a relatively low-level bureaucrat, he maintained remarkable access to the President. During his government employment, Rockefeller’s resources enabled him to intrude into affairs beyond his assigned duties. Not part of the official U.S. delegation to the initial U.N. conference, he flew himself and his subordinates to San Francisco at his own expense and paid for their stay there. Within days he turned himself into a significant figure at the event. Even though he was maneuvered out of the State Department a few months later, Rockefeller retained power to affect the destiny of the United Nations, even securing the land for its permanent headquarters in New York City. It should not be surprising, with all we know about Rocky’s use of the family fortune, that the site was paid for by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Clark Stooksbury is assistant publisher of Liberty.