Coming into the End Zone Read Online Free Page B

I have somewhat less than three minutes to introduce a book, describe it to some extent, and provide some judgments about it. No more than five hundred words. Given the meagerness of time, I have decided to review only books I like, not to waste precious airtime on diatribes against poor books.
    I go uptown to M Street to tape, four reviews at a time. I sit in a silent booth, the engineer on the other side of a glass partition, my producer, Don Lee, in the booth with me because I am not very good at fluent reading anymore. I pop my p ’s, a mistake that sounds like an explosion on the air. I often read the wrong word, stammer (an affliction left over, on occasion, from childhood), or mispronounce a proper noun. These failures require retaping, of a sentence usually. But when you hear me early on Morning Edition , you would never know about these slips. Lee has a device that splices out errors and substitutes the corrected forms. I sound fluent and correct, although he has not been able to do much about the increasing slowness with which I speak.
    When I hear myself on radio I think how wonderful it would be if all the failings of growing old could be so easily corrected by technology.
    Today my reviews are pretty eclectic. One, My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir, is a large handmade volume, a $785 beauty which the Yolla Bolly Press in California has published in an edition of 155 copies. Elegant paper, endpapers designed and made by hand in Mexico by Otomi Indians, binding handsewn, covered in a handwoven rough linen fabric. Every detail of the production of this book is fine. But the cost is high. My intention is to explain why owning such a book is an aesthetic as well as intellectual pleasure.
    The second is Cavalry Maiden by Nadezha Durova, a Russian woman who managed to join the cavalry and fight bravely against Napoleon. Stirred by patriotism, a dislike of domestic limitations on women, and a passion for horses, Durova served in the army for nine years, even after her sex was discovered. A curious yet engrossing book to choose, published by a university press, Indiana, that takes chances on such works, to my delight.
    A biography of Charlotte Mews. I picked it because I did not know who Charlotte Mews was, and wondered why a novelist as skilled as Penelope Fitzgerald wanted to write about so obscure a figure (to me). Turns out it is a superior biography about a fascinating and talented, if now forgotten, poet. I like reviewing books like this, to educate myself, and then my listeners.
    The fourth: a novel by Alice Hoffman, called At Risk . Oh dear God, I thought, when I read the galleys on the train coming back from New York months ago, can I bear to read about an eleven-year-old girl who contracts AIDS from a blood transfusion? Every page hurt to read. But it seemed a good book to review. The moral, unspoken but clear, is the vulnerability of everyone to the terrible scourge, and the inhumanity of those who wish to avoid contact with it, or think they can. The victim is a child gymnast, a fine athlete, which makes the story even more poignant.
    At noon, I will go into the recording studio, wait for the sign to start, give a voice level, and then, in my stumbling way, read the alembic remains of all this reading, like the kitchen midden of a vanished civilization, into a microphone.
    Another hot day. The temperature threatens to go as high as 104 degrees by afternoon. On the deck I find a dead cicada who did not survive the night’s oppression, a beautiful creature even in death, with lacy, iridescent wings and a thick multicolored body. Its bulging eyes are far apart and look like offset stones. I take it to my study to save, a reminder of the summer’s humid destruction.
    For some reason it makes me think of the hundreds of dead horseshoe crabs at Lewes last month, for whom the overly warm water probably proved lethal. They lay in ragged rows just beyond the water line, like dead soldiers, on their