A Really Sullen (and Artful) Memoir

COME HELL ON HIGH WATER: A Really Sullen Memoir by Gregory Jaynes (North Point, $23).

Boomers are growing old and reflective, and they are filling bookshelves with their memoirs. These books, or at least the good ones, turn out to be our only reliable guides to the shared experience of tallying things up, here at what this big, self-conscious generation optimistically calls midlife. Cinema, TV, magazines help hardly at all with their distorted and narrow depiction of authentic experience. So those Americans whelped in the age of “media” now return to the old form to try to discover themselves one more time.

As this book opens, Gregory Jaynes is 47, an accomplished journalist, a writer for Time magazine and a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. He is also about to be a grandfather, disinterested in his marriage and, as he puts it, having trouble saying goodbye to his youth. So he leaves family behind and takes off on an around-the-world passage aboard a Russian icebreaker converted into a freighter, figuring the cost and outcome will be about the same as if he hired a shrink.

The diary of this trip is Jaynes’ droll and artfully composed memoir. He applies wit, the practiced eye of a journalist and his own easy gift for words to the sorry situation of being isolated on a shuddering ship in the company of the dull, doddering senior citizens who are his fellow passengers. The crew is Russian, the officers British, the ports of call uninspiring, the food frightful, the trip lunacy. Thank goodness for the chance to finally read “War and Peace” and reflect on life.

I suspect that some readers will recoil from Jaynes’ chilly, offhand assessment of his desiccated marriage. Writers of memoirs, apparently assuming that we are all old friends, often seem determined to confess more than we may be comfortable knowing. Still, Jaynes is perceptive and intelligent and his voyage, like life itself, is nothing if not bittersweet when you tally it up. We turn these pages for the same reason we rise from bed each day, to wonder: What now?

BAY AREA WILD: A Celebration of the Natural Heritage of the San Francisco Bay Area by Galen Rowell with Michael Sewell (Sierra Club, $37.50, illustrated).

Galen Rowell has come home. One of our most celebrated nature photographers, Rowell is best known for going high and going afar, into the mountains of distant lands. Now, thanks to a nudge from his wife, Barbara, he explores his backyard with a matchless eye for the moods and beauty of nature.

Rowell’s photographs and text are supplemented by a decade’s worth of work from fellow Berkeley outdoors photographer Michael Sewell, who produces some astonishing portraits of Northern California wildlife.

Their combined work, traveling from the seashore to coastal hills, is a book to lift our eyes and spirits about our home, California. As environmental pioneer David Brower says in his introduction: “We cannot create wildness, but we can spare it and celebrate it.”

Quick trips

SANTA FE: Compass America Guides, second edition by Lawrence W. Cheek (Fodor’s, $18.95 paperback, illustrated, maps). Attentive readers will already know that I think Compass America Guides are wonderful--not simply wonderful but richly and literately wonderful. What more can I say about this volume devoted to Santa Fe? Well, this: Don’t read it if you have just returned from a visit to northern New Mexico because you will be heartsick to learn what you missed.

TALL BLONDES: A Book About Giraffes by Lynn Sherr (Andrews McMeel, $16.95 illustrated). Take a well-connected TV correspondent, a couple of trips to Africa, a quick journey through history. Add a jumble of observations and quotes, and one of those dizzying layouts that assumes nobody has the energy to read, only to scan. The result: a heap of publicity for an odd little gift book about one of the most beguiling animals on the planet.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.