Discoveries

Case Files of the Tracker: True Stories From America’s Greatest Outdoorsman

Tom Brown Jr.

Berkley: 208 pp., $14 paper

“In all tracks there is a tiny universe where all of the body’s movements are recorded ... a little landscape, of hills and valleys, ridges and peaks, pocks and domes ... each one indicating some small movement in the body and mind.” Tom Brown (hired by the CIA, the police, Hollywood producers and foreign governments) began tracking when he was 7. His teacher, an 80-year-old Apache whom Brown called Grandfather, taught him not only to read nature but also to hone his awareness, his “tracking point of view,” his inner eye. From a child’s footprint, Grandfather could tell that the child did not yet know she was lost. But from the “Spirit-That-Moves-in-and-Through-All-Things,” he could tell that she would soon find her parents. All this seems quaint, until we hear of Brown’s exploits in the field. A man he trained becomes a murderer and Brown is hired to find him; Brown tracks a missing 3-year-old who’s been eaten by a mountain lion; he’s hired to find illegal graves and interpret forensic evidence. The smallest details tell him the beginnings and endings of stories stretching over lifetimes -- a level of observation, using senses and spirit, almost impossible to learn, buried as it is under layers of evolution, urban living and reliance on technology. Utterly amazing!

*

Down There by the Train

A Novel

Kate Sterns

Shaye Areheart Books:

258 pp., $23

“Pink curlers nested in her hair like newborn hamsters.” “Light from a streetlamp dissolved like a lozenge on a tongue of sunrise.” These and other slightly disturbing metaphors are found in Canadian Kate Sterns’ whimsical novel about a young man who believes in the circular nature of existence. Fresh from prison, standing in the window of Sweeney’s diner, Levon Hawke, 27, is haunted by the death of his younger sister, Alice. He has taken a job (the condition of his parole) with a cousin who’s a baker on a nearby island. On his way there, he gets lost in the woods and finds himself at a strange house with an even stranger young woman living in it, burning encyclopedias for warmth. White nightgowns, poisoned tea, lost slippers, children pushed in ovens, bodies exhumed so bones can be ground to bake bread: It all starts to sound suspiciously familiar. “Down There” is a veritable soup of fairy tales. Sterns keeps the line between real and unreal just foggy enough to be useless. Whatever that caterpillar was smoking in “Alice in Wonderland,” well, it curls through this novel too.

*

Telegram!: Modern History as Told Through More Than 400 Witty, Poignant, and Revealing Telegrams

Linda Rosenkrantz

Henry Holt: 224 pp., $18

There are few things more thrilling, more dangerous than a telegram. Every sender is a miniature Dorothy Parker, an e.e. cummings impersonator. Linda Rosenkrantz presents “a pointillistic view of modern history and the vagaries of human experience ... as recorded via the dots and dashes of the telegram.” Telegrams from Hollywood stars, presidents, generals at the front have been picked with an eye to misery, wit and revelation: “Wondering how the sales of ‘Les Miserables’ were going, Victor Hugo, in exile on the island of Guernsey, telegraphed his publisher: ‘?’ To which the reply came back: ‘!’ ” Vladimir Nabokov, asked to write a 150-word essay on paperbacks for the New York Times Book Review, cabled: “NEAT LITTLE THINGS.” And did you know that Andrew Carnegie, Edward Albee, Henry Miller, and Edward Steichen, among others, were once Western Union messengers? Or that Sinead O’Connor delivered singing telegrams? Telegrams from the Titanic and other disasters are sober reminders of cellphone messages received on Sept. 11. But it’s an otherwise merry collection, reminding us once again (as if we really needed reminding, knowing, as we do, how we do go on) that brevity is the soul of wit.