DISCOVERIES

It’s a book about gambling, so you know it ends badly. At least, you know these two brothers, so unusually close in middle age, both married but childless, both teaching in the English Department at the University of Southern Mississippi, will traverse the curve, beginning to end. It’s not a full circle, gambling: It’s a curve. In addiction, one rarely seems to return to the place one started. These men grew up in a “Franny and Zooey”-type family. Their parents were stylish and smart. Their older brother Don, who died in 1989 of cancer, was a literary light. They began gambling in 1993. After their beloved mother died in 1995, they took it up with a vengeance, analyzing their addiction in sweet midnight car rides to the casino. They lost $90,000 that year. In 1996, their father died. They lost $250,000 that year. They were accused by the casino of colluding with a dealer and were indicted two years later. The brothers offer several reasons for their “ineluctable fall, like gravity,” namely the death of their mother and the intellectual persuasion with which the brothers were raised : to believe “that we could ‘understand’ things and tame them, and second, that words, adroitly deployed, were a bullfighter’s cape.” Still, their grins rise like the Cheshire Cat’s off these pages, two innocents trapped in childhood. Gambling helped them preserve the illusion: “[A]s long as there was money to play with,” they write, “everything else disappeared.”

GIFT OF THE WHALE; The Inupiat Bowhead Hunt, a Sacred Tradition; By Bill Hess; Sasquatch Books: 228 pp., $40

The Inupiak whale hunt is a 5,000-year-old tradition that is part of every waking moment in the lives of the Inupiak Eskimos who live in the Arctic region of Alaska. Whale meat is the food they grow up eating, beside which store-bought modern-day foods are a pale substitute. It’s also what they pray for and to; the shape of the whale is in the talismans their shamans make and the buttons on their coats. It’s in their songs and building materials and sculptures. There aren’t many cultures left like it, and of course they have had to think hard about and react to world opinion regarding the reasons and ways they kill whales. Between 1848 and 1915, Yankee whalers alone killed 19,000 bowhead whales, the depletion of which brought commercial whaling to an end. In 1970, the Bowhead was listed as endangered. The Inupiak were, after much lobbying, given a quota of 18 whales per year to be shared among 10 villages, a number that has increased to more than 250 whales over a five-year period. Bill Hess spent several seasons with the Inupiak, photographing and writing about their hunts (beluga as well as bowhead) and their daily lives. His pictures record women sewing the skins that cover the umiaks (boats used to hunt the whales), children playing with eyeballs, hunters searching for the footprints of friends lost on the ice and the harpooning and shooting and cutting up of the whales. What makes “Gift of the Whale” such a decent and graceful book is Hess’ ability to leave enough emotional white space for readers to make up their own minds about the hunt.

SALT DREAMS; Land & Water in Low-Down California; By William deBuys and Joan Meyres; University of New Mexico Press: 308 pp., $35

Southern California may well go the way of the Salton Sea, that swath of once-desert south of Palm Springs that ran all the way south along the San Andreas fault through Imperial Valley to the border and to the ocean--a lake born after the accidental diversion of the Colorado River in 1905. It had its own yacht club, surely a sign of faith in the future, which now has turned to gaping holes in concrete and rebar and bits of old carpet, material for Meyres, the mirage-eyed photographer whose black and whites (a rainbow of blacks and whites) are glaring testimony to the history DeBuys sifts of the Salton Sea. When people can find beauty in trajectories like these, it reveals an unselfish faith in future generations and in the ability of the earth to heal around scar tissue. DeBuys does the best kind of research, a highly evolved blend of literature and experience: He crosses borders, he squats with delta rats and consorts with bikers, spinning a geographic noir yarn of greed and hubris and ruination.

SIAM; Or the Woman Who Shot a Man; By Lily Tuck; The Overlook Press: 192 pp., $23.95

Thailand in 1967: The United States had just begun the bombing of North Vietnam from Thailand when Claire, a New Englander, joined her new husband, a government contractor living in Bangkok. Claire’s Bostonian reserve is assaulted by the colors and customs of Thailand, enticed by the grace and the art and the flowers and startled by the deception and secrecy of her husband and his colleagues. Claire has the sensibility of a woman in a D.H. Lawrence story, half-asleep, waiting to be wakened and once wakened, smashed. In her motiveless fascination for the disappearance of one of her husband’s colleagues, Jim Thompson, in the northern jungles, she amasses clues and sleepily makes connections that point to her husband’s guilt and put her in danger. “Siam” gets increasingly sinister as Claire’s intelligence dulls. She tries to learn the language; she looks for clues. In the background, the war gets more divisive and violent, like a drumbeat driving the plot.