Discoveries

THE NATURE OF GENEROSITY

By William Kittredge

Alfred A. Knopf: 278 pp., $25

William Kittredge grew up on a ranch in Oregon, learned to ride horses when he was 4, left the ranch in his 20s, was ruined for ranch life yet uplifted by books, then later saved himself by writing. Many Kittredges live alarmingly side by side in this book. There is Kittredge at home: “My own sense of what’s valuable was defined in a swampy valley ringed by high deserts, and it centers on families, intelligent horses, deep, fragrant peat soil, flocks of water birds traced one above the other, calling in the silent morning sky.” There is Kittredge philosophizing and using home-grown metaphors: “We ride stories like rafts, or lay them out on the table like maps.” And there is Kittredge abroad, traveling with the woman he loves in France and Italy. Here his philosophizing is much further-flung, less rooted in nature’s metaphors: “Generosity is freely driven altruism, which is to say that it involves no discernible feedback except for ‘increased self-regard.’ ” The only trouble with this very generous book is that Kittredge’s memories of growing up are so much more beautiful than his philosophizing. Paris is all well and good, but the isolation of Warner Valley and the fate of those ranchers, that “aristocracy” (“they knew their time was ending and they hated it”), that “fiefdom,” the ranch his family owned--these things live in the timing and decency and construction of his very sentences. Some things just can’t be footnoted.

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GROWING UP UNTOUCHABLE IN INDIA

A Dalit Autobiography

By Vasant Moon

Translated by Eleanor Zelliot

Rowman and Littlefield:

194 pp., $19.95

Dalit is the name taken by untouchables after untouchability was made illegal in India in 1950. Vasant Moon grew up in central India, in Nagpur, among the Mahars, a subgroup of untouchables. His father left his mother when Vasant was 4, and she went to work in a local mill. Vasant spent much of his childhood without food or clothing (when he went to school, he would not wash his one set of clothes because they would fall apart). He was a good student, was able to go to college and, in his early 20s, to get a respectable, well-paying job. The background to this memoir is the untouchables’ struggle for basic rights, led by B.R. Ambedkar, who died in 1956. To the Mahars, he was a greater hero than Gandhi because he fought for true political inclusion of the untouchables, while Gandhi’s focus was on the Quit India movement to get the British out of India. There are few such autobiographies, especially in English, which makes Moon’s memories of sleeping on village roads side by side with neighbors, of his mother waking at 4:30 a.m. to work in the mill and of the kindness of certain teachers particularly valuable.

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THE PALACE OF TEARS

By Alev Lytle Croutier

Delacorte: 172 pp., $19.95

You can understand from reading “The Palace of Tears” why novels were once considered dangerous and subversive, as well as frivolous. Alev Lytle Croutier’s heavily brocaded writing is dazzling: It can inspire a longing in a reader for another time, a deeper love and a whole host of other unrealistic desires. In 1868, a vintner, Casimir de Cha^teauneuf, saw a miniature painting in a shop of a young woman. The painting was titled “La Poupee,” the doll. He fell in love with her and set sail to the Orient in search of her. La Poupee was living in the Palace of Tears, a home for women discarded by the sultan. Sometimes it is important not to reveal the ending of stories, especially when the bedraggled cynicism of the present is challenged by pure fantasy. For all you know, he never finds her.

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TEST OF COURAGE

The Michel Thomas Story

By Christopher Robbins

The Free Press: 382 pp., $27.50

Born in 1914 in Poland, Michel Thomas was arrested by the Vichy government, sent to a concentration camp in the Pyrenees, escaped, fought with the French Resistance, worked at the end of the war for counterintelligence in Germany to round up Nazis, came to the United States in 1947 and started the Polyglot Institute, a language school with branches all over the world that teaches its students how to speak various languages in astonishingly short periods of time (like three days). Thomas claims to have learned how to take apart and literally plant a language in a student’s mind. His students have included Yves Montand, Woody Allen and Emma Thompson, among several thousand others. Again and again, Thomas was able to escape or argue or charm his way out of life-threatening situations, despite an almost rigid refusal to compromise principles he held dear, like his Jewishness. He lost the love of his life because she had compromised herself romantically with a bureaucrat to get Thomas out of Le Vernet. It is a story that highlights the power of the human mind and will.