Elegy in Blue: Mark Helprin Still Believes in Heroes

Reading Mark Helprin’s Elegy in Blue feels like visiting an old friend, a friend who is clearly aging, (as am I) but still his brilliant self. Readers like me who have followed Helprin across four decades of novels know the territory well: a noble hero, a luminous woman, evil that must be confronted, and prose so beautiful and so funny that even ordinary scenes seem touched by poetry or stand up comedy. At age 78, Helprin remains unmistakably himself.

Any discussion of Elegy in Blue must begin with A Winter’s Tale (1983), the novel that established Helprin as one of America’s most distinctive writers. That extraordinary work of magical realism transformed New York City and the Hudson Valley into a mythic landscape inhabited by the unforgettable Peter Lake and the ethereal Beverly Penn. The novel, Helprin's second, stretched reality almost to the breaking point, yet somehow remained emotionally true and solid. It remains for me Helprin’s masterpiece and one of the most beautiful American novels of the last half century.

Much of Helprin’s later work has been more grounded (at least partially) in recognizable reality. Whether set in New York, Paris, the American West, or aboard a US Navy gunboat, his novels increasingly inhabit the world we know. Yet the essential Helprin vision remains unchanged. His heroes are honorable, capable men devoted to family, duty, beauty, and civilization itself. They are gentle when gentleness is called for and utterly ruthless when confronted by evil. His heroines are equally remarkable—intelligent, beautiful, courageous, and possessed of an almost impossible competence. Realistic they may not always be, but they are part of the moral universe Helprin has spent a lifetime creating.

In Paris in the Present Tense (2017), the seventy-five-year-old cellist Jules Lacour displayed a vigor and competence that seemed remarkable for a man of his age. Early in that novel, Lacour intervenes to stop Islamic terrorists from murdering an Orthodox Jew, killing two of the terrorists. Lacour escapes by swimming the Seine at night through barge and tour boat traffic. Beyond improbable, but devoted Helprin readers ride the wave of fantasy.

In Elegy in Blue, Helprin pushes the geriatric hero theme even further. His unnamed protagonist is eighty-two years old. Three years earlier, at seventy-nine, he intervened when a young Nazi who had volunteered with ISIS attacked students and parents at an Orthodox Shul in Brooklyn, killing seven before the protagonist ended the massacre by tackling the terrorist and breaking his neck, yet within Helprin’s fictional universe, it feels plausible.

What matters is not realism but aspiration. Helprin has spent his career writing about what human beings might be at their best. His heroes are embodiments of courage, loyalty, and moral clarity. In an age of antiheroes and moral ambiguity, Helprin continues to believe in heroism. 

The pleasures of Elegy in Blue are the pleasures that longtime readers have come to expect. The prose sparkles with wit and observation. The dialogue is intelligent and often very funny. The action unfolds with confidence. The final major action of the novel will surprise no one familiar with Helprin’s work, yet it remains deeply satisfying because it fulfills the promises the novel has been making from its opening pages.

As I read the book over a weekend, I found myself reflecting on the unusual trajectory of Helprin’s career. Many writers become more cynical with age, especially a writer with profoundly conservative politics who is a scholar at the Claremont institute. Helprin has remained remarkably consistent. He still believes in beauty, love, courage, and civilization. He still believes that evil exists and must be opposed. And he still writes as though great men and women walk among us.

Whether one accepts Helprin’s vision or not, there is no one else writing quite like him. The title says this is the final novel, but maybe there will be an 86-year-old who pushes a terrorist into the path of a Q train with his cane then disappears into the labyrinth of Atlantic Ave--Barclays Center Station.  

Elegy in Blue is not Heprin's greatest novel, it is the latest variation on themes he has been exploring since Refiner's Fire, his first novel.  For readers who have traveled with him through those decades, it is a welcome return to familiar ground and a reminder that Mark Helprin remains one of America’s great writers. 

Stalingrad: War and Peace for the Twentieth Century

Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is an ambitious novel, and remarkably, it succeeds in its vast ambition. When Grossman set out to tell the story of the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazi Germany, he was consciously writing in the shadow of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. His goal was to create a twentieth-century epic that captured an entire society confronting war, suffering, sacrifice, and history. I first read this novel a decade ago and now rereading it, I am convinced that Grossman came as close as anyone ever has to achieving that goal.

Like Tolstoy, Grossman moves effortlessly between generals and laborers, scientists and soldiers, mothers and bureaucrats. The coming battle for Stalingrad forms the center of gravity for the novel, but the book is about far more than military operations. Grossman is interested in how ordinary people endure extraordinary circumstances. His characters argue, fall in love, worry about their children, struggle with political loyalty, and attempt to preserve their humanity as the machinery of war closes around them.

One of the great strengths of Stalingrad is that Grossman never loses sight of the immense scale of the conflict while maintaining his focus on individual lives. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of history’s decisive military engagements, but Grossman understands that history is ultimately experienced one person at a time. His achievement lies in making readers care about those individuals while never forgetting the larger forces that shape their lives.

Reading the novel today, however, is a different experience than it was ten years ago. The Russian invasion of Ukraine casts a long shadow over every page. Grossman himself was born in what is now Ukraine, and the Soviet Army he describes was an army composed of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, and dozens of other nationalities united against a common enemy. Throughout the novel, Russians and Ukrainians fight side by side against the Nazi invasion, sharing hardships, losses, and victories. Knowing that their descendants now face one another across battlefields is profoundly sad.

The novel also offers insight into the current war. Grossman’s depiction of Soviet resistance reminds readers of the extraordinary capacity for suffering displayed by both Russians and Ukrainians during the Second World War. The people he portrays endure losses that are almost unimaginable, yet continue fighting. Reading Stalingrad today makes it difficult to believe that either side in the current conflict will simply collapse from exhaustion or casualties. The historical memory of sacrifice runs too deep.

Yet Grossman is no simple patriot. Even within the constraints of Soviet censorship, he reveals the tensions and contradictions within Stalin’s state. The seeds of the more daring and devastating second novel Life and Fate are already present. The themes that would later define that masterpiece—freedom, tyranny, courage, and moral responsibility—can be seen emerging beneath the surface of Stalingrad.

As a historical novel, Stalingrad is magnificent. As a portrait of a society at war, it is unmatched. And as a reminder of both the resilience and tragedy of the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, it feels more relevant today than when Grossman first wrote it. Few novels better capture the human cost of war, and fewer still achieve it on such an epic scale.

Now I will reread Life and Fate.

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In 2019 I read Stalingrad and wrote about it here.

Everything Must Go: A Review

Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is a fascinating tour through humanity’s long obsession with the end of the world. Part literary history, part cultural criticism, and part catalog of catastrophe, the book explores how people have imagined apocalypse across centuries of novels, films, religious movements, political ideologies, and scientific speculation.

The scope of Lynskey’s research is astonishing. He moves effortlessly from the Book of Revelation to nuclear war fiction, from H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley to Hollywood disaster movies and modern climate-change narratives. Along the way, he introduces a seemingly endless parade of prophets, novelists, filmmakers, cult leaders, scientists, and doomsayers who have tried to explain how the world might end—and what that ending would reveal about humanity itself.

What emerges is less a history of apocalypse than a history of human fears. Every era imagines destruction in its own image. Religious societies envision divine judgment. The Cold War generated visions of nuclear annihilation. Today, environmental collapse, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and technological disruption occupy the place once held by biblical horsemen. The details change, but the fascination remains remarkably constant.

One of the book’s strengths is Lynskey’s ability to treat these visions seriously without surrendering to them. He understands that apocalyptic stories are rarely just about destruction. They are often expressions of hope, warning, wish fulfillment, or moral judgment. The end of the world becomes a way of talking about the world we currently inhabit.

At times, however, the book can feel almost too comprehensive. The sheer number of books, films, historical episodes, and personalities discussed occasionally creates the feeling of reading an encyclopedia of apocalypse rather than a single sustained argument. Readers looking for a strong central thesis may find themselves overwhelmed by the abundance of examples.

Yet that abundance is also the book’s achievement. Lynskey has assembled what is likely the most exhaustive survey of end-of-the-world imagination available in a single volume. Even when the discussion wanders, it remains engaging because the subject itself is so endlessly inventive.

In the end, Everything Must Go demonstrates that humanity has spent centuries imagining its own extinction. The details differ, but the impulse is universal. We seem unable to stop asking how the story ends—and what that ending might say about who we are. 

Mittelbau Dora--The Death Camp That Made V-2 Rockets

 Mittelbau-Dora, located near Nordhausen in central Germany, was one of the most brutal and technically driven camps in the Nazi system. Established in late 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald, it became an independent concentration camp in October 1944. Its creation was tied directly to Germany’s desperation in the later years of World War II, as Allied bombing made above-ground weapons production increasingly vulnerable.

The camp’s central purpose was the underground manufacture of V-2 rockets, the so-called “vengeance weapons” developed under Wernher von Braun’s program. Production was moved into a vast network of tunnels carved into the Kohnstein mountain. Prisoners—drawn from across occupied Europe—were forced to excavate, expand, and work within these tunnels under horrific conditions. Unlike camps designed primarily for extermination, Mittelbau-Dora was a labor camp, but the distinction is misleading. The labor itself became a method of mass death.

In its early phase, prisoners were not even housed in barracks. They lived and slept inside the tunnels where they worked, without sunlight, adequate ventilation, sanitation, or sufficient food. The air was thick with dust, chemicals, and smoke. Disease spread quickly. Exhaustion was constant. Those who could not keep up—through illness, injury, or simple collapse—were beaten, executed, or sent to other camps to die.

By the time the camp was liberated in April 1945, more than 60,000 prisoners had passed through the Mittelbau system, including its many subcamps. An estimated 20,000 died. Many were Soviet prisoners of war, along with Poles, French, Dutch, and other European detainees, as well as political prisoners and resistance members. Jews were also among the victims, though the camp’s population was more mixed than extermination camps like Auschwitz.

The irony at Mittelbau-Dora is stark and enduring. The V-2 rockets produced there represented one of the most advanced technological achievements of the war—an early step toward spaceflight. Yet they were built through conditions of almost unimaginable human degradation. More people died constructing the rockets than were killed by their use.

When American forces approached, the SS evacuated much of the camp, sending prisoners on death marches. Those who remained were liberated on April 11, 1945.

Mittelbau-Dora stands as a reminder that the Nazi system was not only about ideology and extermination, but also about the ruthless exploitation of human beings in service of technological ambition. It is a place where modernity and barbarism existed side by side—indistinguishable in practice.

Another sad example of Nazis making money on slave labor is Flossenburg.

A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics by David Stipp: The Joy of Understanding!

 

A Most Elegant Equation by David Stipp is a small book about a large idea: that mathematics, at its deepest level, is not a collection of separate tools but a unified language capable of describing the universe with astonishing precision. Centered on Euler’s identity—often called the most beautiful equation in mathematics—the book shows how seemingly unrelated parts of math come together in a single, elegant statement.

As someone whose formal math education stopped at Calculus II, I found the book both accessible and intriguing. It does not require advanced training to appreciate the central insight: that numbers, functions, and constants that appear to belong to entirely different domains—imaginary numbers, exponential growth, circular motion—can be woven together into a relationship that is both exact and profound. The equation itself feels almost like a coincidence at first glance, but the book patiently reveals the deeper structure behind it.

What makes the book especially compelling is its ability to convey why this matters beyond mathematics. The same abstract relationships that produce Euler’s identity also underlie the physical world—waves, oscillations, and the geometry of space. It is a reminder that mathematics is not just invented, but discovered, uncovering patterns that seem to exist independent of us.

At times, the explanations push the edge of what a non-specialist can easily follow, and some readers may find themselves rereading sections to fully grasp the connections. But that effort is part of the experience. The reward is a clearer sense of how disparate ideas—real and imaginary numbers, algebra and geometry—fit together into a coherent whole.

In the end, A Most Elegant Equation succeeds not by teaching advanced mathematics, but by revealing its unity. It leaves the reader with a renewed sense of wonder at how something so abstract can so precisely describe the world we live in.

Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills--The Gettysburg Address Moved America from Constitutional Compromise to Aspiration

 

Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg is a short book with a large argument: that Abraham Lincoln, in just 272 words, redefined the meaning of the American republic. Wills’s central claim: the Gettysburg Address does not look to the Constitution as the nation’s founding document, but to the Declaration of Independence. In this address, Lincoln shifted the moral center of the United States from a framework of compromise to one of aspiration.

The Constitution, as Wills reminds us, is a document forged through political necessity—one that accommodated slavery in order to secure union. The Declaration, by contrast, proclaims a principle: that all men are created equal. Lincoln’s genius at Gettysburg was to elevate that principle above the compromises of 1787 and to present it as the true foundation of the nation. “Four score and seven years ago” reaches back not to the Constitution’s ratification, but to 1776, reframing the Civil War as a test of whether a nation dedicated to equality can endure.

Wills shows that this was not rhetorical flourish but the culmination of Lincoln’s evolving thought. Over the course of his career, Lincoln moved from a position of containing slavery to one of confronting its moral incompatibility with the nation’s founding ideals. Yet he never abandoned his primary objective: preserving the Union. In Lincoln’s mind, the Union and the principle of equality were not separate goals but intertwined ones. The Union gave political life to the Declaration’s promise; without it, the principle would remain abstract.

One of the book’s most compelling insights is Lincoln’s refusal to treat the Confederacy as a separate nation. Even in the midst of a brutal war, Lincoln spoke and acted as the president of all Americans. Southerners were not foreigners but citizens engaged in rebellion—participants in what he viewed as an unlawful act against a legitimate government. This stance shaped both his wartime policies and the tone of the Gettysburg Address, which avoids vindictiveness and instead calls for “a new birth of freedom” that would bind the nation together more fully than before.

Wills also situates the address within its intellectual and cultural context, contrasting Lincoln’s spare, biblical language with the ornate oratory of his contemporaries. The result is a speech that feels both timeless and radical, quietly overturning the assumptions on which the nation had been built.

Lincoln at Gettysburg is ultimately a study in how ideas shape history. Wills demonstrates that Lincoln did not merely commemorate the dead at Gettysburg—he reinterpreted the American experiment itself, grounding it not in compromise, but in a moral vision that continues to define the country’s aspirations.

Beautiful, Suggestive, and Not Quite Convincing: A review of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

 Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth is an elegant, curious, and ultimately frustrating book. It sits at the intersection of science writing and philosophical speculation, and while it succeeds admirably at the former, it strains credibility in the latter.

Schlanger is at her best when she is simply observing. Her reporting on plant behavior—root systems exchanging chemical signals, leaves responding to touch, forests linked through underground fungal networks—is vivid and often mesmerizing. She has a gift for rendering the slow, silent life of plants into something legible and even dramatic. You come away with a sharpened sense that plants are not passive background but active participants in the ecosystems we barely notice.

Where the book begins to wobble is in its central claim: that these behaviors amount to something like intelligence. Schlanger builds her case through anecdotes and emerging research, but the leap from responsiveness to cognition is never fully justified. The evidence feels suggestive rather than conclusive, and at times the argument seems to run ahead of the science, leaning on metaphor where demonstration would be required.

That tension defines the book. It is never dull—far from it—but it leaves you unconvinced. You learn a great deal about how plants live, communicate, and adapt, yet the larger thesis remains just out of reach, more poetic than proven.

In the end, The Light Eaters is best read not as a definitive account of plant intelligence, but as an invitation to rethink how we define life and awareness. It opens a door, but it does not quite walk you through it.