Even Darkness Sings

July 9, 2018
Horrific atrocities prompt reflection and hesitant redemption in this sometimes lugubrious, sometimes luminous memoir in which crime novelist Cook (The Chatham School Affair) recounts his travels with his wife and daughter to bloody and blighted locales. The several dozen destinations include citadels of death, like Auschwitz and the Verdun battlefield, where 300,000 men died during WWI (Cook finds the solemnity there shattered by boisterous teenagers), but also more obscure corners of sorrow: a Japanese temple to the souls of aborted fetuses; a Parisian square that hosted a grisly public execution; the nation of Ghana, sad partly because of a former slave prison but mainly because of ongoing poverty. Cook plumbs the fascinating histories of these sites, leavening them with vibrant present-day travelogue, like an evocative depiction of the Catholic shrine at Lourdes as a study in neon-lit tawdriness beside candle-lit piety (clear Virgin Mary statues were crafted with her in “a blue gown that could be unscrewed, thus turning the sacred effigy into a water container”). Cook doesn’t reach for moral lessons in the awful past; instead they emerge tacitly from signs of life and compassion he discovers in the present. The result is a gripping exploration of how hope sprouts from despair.

August 15, 2018
A trip through "some of the saddest places on earth" that the author describes as "less sad than revelatory and appreciative."After more than 30 works in his genre, prolific, award-winning crime novelist Cook (A Dancer in the Dust, 2015, etc.) tries his hand at nonfiction with a quirky but engrossing travel book of 28 short chapters whose theme--unhappy locales throughout the world--delivers on its promise. In addition to the usual suspects--Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Verdun, ground zero and the former World Trade Center--there are some decidedly more obscure places. Phu Quoc is a small island where America's Saigon ally kept prisoners during the Vietnam War. New Echota is the former capital of the Cherokee nation in Georgia. Historians often lament America's forced expulsion of the tribe to Oklahoma in the 1830s; in fact, they endured a death march similar to Bataan's, with much the same rate of starvation, abuse, and death. As the world's two leading sites of suicide, Japan's Aokigahara Forest, at the base of Mount Fuji, and the Golden Gate Bridge share a chapter. Of the former, Cook writes, "since 1950, over five hundred people have come here to die by their own hand. In 2003 alone, one hundred bodies were found by the wood's hikers and volunteer searchers." An entire African nation, Ghana, occupies two. It is far from the poorest and not particularly violent, but it is a land of crumbling infrastructure, terrible sanitation, and quietly corrupt leaders who soak up the foreign aid. More than one horror turns up in these pages. A comic-book character today, the real Bluebeard was a 15th-century nobleman in a small French town who raped and tortured to death hundreds of young boys over nearly 15 years until he offended a local bishop.Insightful, sometimes shocking, and often disheartening.

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