Booktalk

This past week I read two books by Lauren Redniss that our library recently acquired: Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, and Thunder & Lightning: Weather, Past, Present, Future.

These books are difficult to pigeon-hole (my favorite ‘kind’). They provide an experience like visiting a museum in a great city; where the articulate museum displays and rare aesthetic setting merge with a memory of a grey-haired docent, a crisp croissant in the museum cafe, and an exotic bouquet the size of a recliner dominating the lobby - a sensory feast that expands the content of the exhibit into a life event.

A tall order, but Lauren Redniss possesses rare Renaissance skills. To begin with, she designed the typeface, especially, for both books. That deserves a pause; designing type to serve the particular vision of one’s book. I bow at the waist.

The color-saturated, page-bleed illustrations that sustain every page are all hers. They often speak where no word would do. The intricate processes she uses to create them, copper-plate photogravure etching and cyanotype prints, reflect a kind of authenticity of purpose in the project. The text inhabits these images like conversation; cropping up in ordered, incidental, and emphatic ways that that hold and then release us. Each two-page spread is poetry; her line renderings efficiently graphic, but warm, personal.

And her writing? her storytelling? I would say bold, sideways, cumulative, and almost-suspensefully choreographed. By assembling dialogues, interviews, and accounts (from a wonderfully-documented bounty of primary sources) we construct the narrative, such as it is, from the contemporaries and experts she calls upon. Her leaps of generation and context to bring us surprising voices of perspectives is risk-taking and strangely engaging.

I feel as though I have been given access to a personal scrapbook; meticulously researched and lovingly made about an intensely passionate interest. If it is not classically beautiful or conventionally organized it remains a testament to scholarship, personal vision, and the amazing range of talents that an individual can bring to bear on wanting to learn and wanting to share.