Putting the Genes in Genealogy

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Double helix

Double helix (from: Mehmet Pinarci, creative commons license)

Science has come to the aid—at least potentially—of people searching for their ancestors and far-flung family members. Genealogists now can draw on the insights provided by genetic testing resources, the two most prominent of which are 23andMe and Ancestry.com, when exploring their family tree. All that’s needed is to order a kit from these organizations, spit into the test tube they send, mail it back, and in six to eight weeks you’ll receive an email with a private link to the results: your own, unique genome described and codified.

Of course, some cash has to change hands too. 23andMe charges $199 for its testing, and Ancestry.com charges $99. There’s an important reason for that price differential. Ancestry’s only interest is in the genealogical significance of your genetic information. 23andMe—which I used for my genetic test several years ago—didn’t start out to do family ancestry testing at all. When I joined, the focus was on health and research. The health component comes in with helping you understand the implications of your genetic risks for various diseases and conditions.

The research focus was what interested me. You may know that new drugs and treatments ordinarily must be tested in time-consuming, expensive clinical trials. When it comes to designing a trial for a disease with a genetic component, researchers may need to know whether a new drug, has different effects in people with different genetic profiles. If so, they must find a large number of people with those specific profiles in order to run their tests. Finding these people can take literally years. Often, they never identify enough suitable people and, after great effort and expense, the trial must be abandoned. A core idea of 23andMe was that having a preexisting database containing people’s genetic profiles would help researchers find people with specific genetic characteristics more quickly. A proof of concept was achieved in the area of Parkinson’s disease. In addition, through questionnaires, they find out much more about people with specific genetic profiles, too. That’s why I joined 23andMe, because I thought that database sounded like such an invaluable resource.

Other organizations also offer genetic testing, but Ancestry.com and 23andMe both have made a substantial commitment to developing useful genealogical tools and have the size advantage of more than a million members each. You don’t want to be like the first person to buy a FAX machine. “Cute, but what do you do with it?” You want as many potential connections as possible.

My DNA relatives from 23andMe include four people identified by genetics as my second cousins. Three of them are strangers to me, but they come from the parts of the country that certain family members are from, and their profiles mention specific family surnames. The fourth person is my second cousin who lives in Denver, whom I know well. That known relationship shows the system is working! 23andMe makes it easy to contact the others, and I’m hoping one of them can help clear up a mystery involving our specific shared ancestors. (Since I wrote this, I’ve confirmed one of these strangers is a second cousin, once removed. Now I can dig into a little Alabama family history with him.)

What you most hope for in making these contacts is that one of them is a determined genealogist too. A couple of years ago a stranger from Washington State contacted me via 23andMe, and we did indeed turn out to be distant cousins. He introduced me to other cousins in his line who’d done some family research. It’s been both fun and enlightening to share information and questions—and some answers—with them.

The Martian

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The Martian, Matt DamonRidley Scott’s movie (trailer) based on the runaway best-seller by debut author Andy Weir is a knockout. But then I’m a sucker for stories with a big component of “how to make things work.” The hero of this story, astronaut Mark Watney has to get a lot of things working very fast, when the crew of the ARES III Mission inadvertently strands him on Mars, “the first person to be alone on a whole planet.” Watney (played by Matt Damon) is left behind when a massive sandstorm threatens the entire crew. Flying debris damages his biotelemetry unit, which registers him as dead. And in the storm, they can’t find his body.

First, he must solve the problems of food and water, long-term, since it will take at least four years until another Mars mission could rescue him, even if NASA knows he’s still alive. Which he has no way of telling them. It’s a test of humanity to put a person in extreme circumstances, and you cannot get any more extreme than the surface of the Red Planet.

Back on Earth, though, eagle-eyed Mars-watchers notice movement on the planet surface and come to an obvious conclusion. The race is then on—against distance, bureaucracy, technological limitations, and the implacable elements of Mars. All I can say is I’m glad I’m not NASA Director Teddy Sanders’s (Jeff Daniels) or his media relations director (Kristen Wiig). Especially strong were the roles of Jet Propulsion Lab director Bruce Ng (played by Benedict Wong), and ARES III Mission Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Matt Damon is terrific, as always, in the role of Watney. Just the right mix of angst and wit, supported by an excellent script from Drew Goddard. The Martian surface was filmed in Wadi Rum, Jordan.

I know there are people who believe they don’t like science fiction. To me, movies like this are less about the science and more about the human spirit and how it can engage with the creative mind. The science makes it read “real.” As The Atlantic critic Christopher Orr wrote, “Excellence in cinema is sometimes a singular achievement . . . On other occasions, it’s the result of extraordinary collaboration. The Martian is one of these.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 93%, viewer ratings: 93%.

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***Summer House with Swimming Pool

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swimming pool, swimmer

(photo: alobos life, creative commons license)

By Herman Koch, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett – Having greatly admired Dutch writer Herman Koch’s European best-seller The Dinner, I was delighted to find this more recent novel. The two have much in common: a first-person narration by men who turn out to be not entirely reliable, an unfolding tragic event whose full scope is only gradually revealed; and the grounding of the story in the hyper-intense relationships of a nuclear family, where every secret evokes the possibility of catastrophe.

The narrator of The Dinner was quite likeable, at least at first, his chameleon colors revealed only bit by bit. In this novel, Koch’s narrator, Dutch general physician Marc Schlosser, shows his disgruntlement cards early on. Married with two preteen/early teen daughters, his feelings about women are entirely retrograde: “I looked at her (a just-met woman) the way every man looks at a woman who enters his field of vision for the first time. Could you do it with her? I asked myself, looking her deep in the eyes. Yes, was the response.” Or, “Any father would rather have a son than a daughter.” Or, “I laughed . . . the sooner you laugh during a conversation with a woman, the better. They’re not used to it, women, to making people laugh. They think they’re not funny. They’re right, usually.”

Ouch, ouch, and ouch.

Yet, Marc is not more charitable toward the men he encounters, truth be told, or toward any of his patients, whom he even fantasizes about killing. Why Marc is so dissatisfied is never quite clear. Is he just a curmudgeon in the wrong profession? Did he take too seriously the lectures of his amoral medical school professor?

A luckless new patient is the famous actor Ralph Meier, a past-middle-age womanizer attracted to Marc’s wife Caroline. Marc, in turn, is attracted to Ralph’s younger wife Judith, and his attention seems to be reciprocated. Entangling the families further are Marc’s daughters’ growing relationships with Ralph’s slightly older sons.

At a minor early summer social event the four members of each family come together in a powerful way, which leads to an invitation to visit the Meier family at their summer house in some unspecified seaside destination. Marc, his eye on Judith, shamelessly manipulates his family’s vacation itinerary, while denying his intent, to ensure the encounter happens. The conflicting personalities, the muddled motives of Marc, and the ingestion of too much alcohol create a decidedly unhappy holiday from which hardly anyone will emerge unscathed.

The novel contains a couple of critically weak plot points (which I won’t divulge) that mar its believability. I’m not the only reader to find that Summer House suffers by comparison with the diabolical genius of The Dinner, with New York Times reviewer Lionel Shriver calling this follow-up “inexplicably careless.” Read The Dinner instead.

A Comedy of Tenors

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A Comedy of Tenors, Paris

Antoinette LaVecchia (Maria) and Bradley Dean (Tito)(photo: Roger Mastroianni. Courtesy, Cleveland Play House)

Ken Ludwig’s new play, A Comedy of Tenors is a good old-fashioned theatrical farce. “Three tenors. Three egos. One stage. What can possibly go wrong?” said the Cleveland Play House promotion. You may remember Ludwig’s big hit of 26 years ago—Lend Me a Tenor—and this one, too, involves amorous shenanigans with high-voltage opera stars, most of them the same characters who appeared in the earlier play.

A Comedy of Tenors premiered at the Cleveland Play House in September then moved to Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, which co-produced it and where it was on stage through November 1. The entire cast of seven moved with it, as did director Stephen Wadsworth, who has masterminded numerous notable McCarter plays over the past two decades. Wadsworth is well acquainted with the operatic temperament through his work with opera companies across Europe, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and as director of Opera Studies at the Julliard School. He doubtless has a natural affinity for this comedic material.

Set in 1930s Paris, the story centers on the final hours before a “three tenors”-style concert. But impresario Henry Saunders can’t seem to get his three singers in the same place at the same time. First, a Swedish tenor drops out altogether, but the biggest star of the bunch—Tito “Il Stupendo” Merelli—objects to the replacement Saunders is lucky to find. He’s a much younger man whose popularity is soaring, and Merelli is beginning to feel his age. Making matters worse are several romantic mixups that only a deft hand with comedy can carry off. The three singers finally come together, then fall apart again, and it appears the only man who can save Saunders’s concert is a bellhop with a golden voice.

The strikingly gorgeous set used in Cleveland—a luxury hotel suite—also made the trip to Princeton. As set designer Charlie Corcoran said in the program notes, “There’s one very specific need in all farces, and that is doors.” Doors to enter, doors to exit, and doors to slam. Lead actor Bradley Dean makes good use of those doors, as he plays both Merelli and the bellhop, and must exit the stage left door as Tito, dash around backstage (changing costume en route) and enter the door stage right as the bellhop. Watching him switch roles, costumes, and personae is one of the play’s great charms.

Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor is still playing all over the United States, and for theatergoers who love a romantic farce, his new play is something to watch for!

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

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Peggy Guggenheim, Alexander Calder

Guggenheim with an Alexander Calder mobile (photo: JR, creative commons license)

The new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (trailer) tells the story of Guggenheim’s remarkable role in preserving and presenting modern art. The niece of Solomon Guggenheim, whose New York City museum is a fixture in the contemporary art scene, she immersed herself in art while living in Paris and London in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film was directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland (interview), whose first award-winning film focused on another larger-than-life woman, Diana Vreeland. In Guggenheim, the filmmaker saw a woman who was courageous, strong, and had the “ability to believe in underdogs. These artists were not mainstream, yet she had the vision to believe in them and create a new place in history for them and for herself.”

In 1937, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London, which showcased artists such as Jean Cocteau and Vasily Kandinsky. As World War II began in Europe, she purchased treasured works by artists such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian, and as the war escalated, she arranged for over 150 paintings and sculpture to be shipped as “household goods” to New York, thereby saving seminal works from being confiscated or destroyed.

She conducted notorious love affairs with numerous artists, including Max Ernst, whom she married briefly after helping him leave Europe. Ernst has one of the best quips in the film saying, “I had a Guggenheim, and it wasn’t a fellowship!”

The documentary uses extensive interviews with art historians and curators to describe how Guggenheim became the protector and promoter of postwar art. As The Hollywood Reporter’s John Defore says, when she settled down in Venice, she would “throw great parties, tend to dozens of dogs, and watch the world grasp the scope of what she’d done.” Her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal is now home of The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, one of the most important showcases in Italy for the works of early 20th century American and European artists.

While the documentary has been making the film festival circuit, reportedly it will have a limited distribution in theaters beginning November 6.

UPDATE, 11/13: Los Angeles Times Credits Guggenheim’s perspicacity!

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Piazza Venier dei Leoni, Venice

Piazza Venier dei Leoni (photo: wikipedia)

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***We Are Not Ourselves

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Bronxville, movie theater

(photo: June Marie, creative commons license)

By Matthew Thomas, read by Mare Winningham – I have mixed feelings about this lengthy novel (21 hours in audio; 640 pages in print). The story follows the life of Eileen Tumulty, born in 1941, her rocky relationships with her alcoholic Irish-American parents, her thirty-year-or-so marriage, her career and experience of being a parent to her son, her husband’s early-onset dementia, and into her widowhood.

At its core, it is about relationships, yet the relationship between husband and wife remained a mystery to me, as it changed over time, and that between father and son is fully explicated only in the last pages through the rather clunky device of a posthumous letter. Though the letter was quite moving in some passages, others refer to events I did not recall “seeing” in the book. Eileen’s arm’s-length relationship with her parents carries forward; her grown-up son Connell says the hug she gives him is the first time in his memory (she disagrees) that she has ever initiated such an embrace. One of the book’s strengths is the complexity of the characters. They have strengths and flaws that shape their interactions believably.

Eileen’s a smart girl, but family finances limit her educational choices, and she becomes a nurse, when she wanted to be, could have been, a doctor. She meets and marries neuroscientist and college professor Edmund Leary, who stubbornly refuses the more lucrative and prestigious job offers that come his way. Eileen sees his choices as a brake on the family’s upward mobility.

Connell loves baseball and is an excellent young player, but Eileen pressures him to give it up to join the school debate team, which she thinks will lead to the best grades, the best colleges, the greatest success. Eileen is preoccupied for much of the middle of the book in getting the family out of their deteriorating Jamaica, Queens, apartment and neighborhood and into a “nice” house in suburban Bronxville. The family finances barely make the stretch, but she plows ahead anyway.

Meanwhile, Ed is deteriorating, and the onset of neurological decline must be terrifying to someone so acutely aware of the consequences. We see Ed struggling to accommodate. I couldn’t understand why Eileen, a nurse, takes such a long time to figure out what was going wrong with him. It didn’t seem to be denial. That aside, the author does a remarkable job portraying the challenges the family confronts as Ed’s capacity declines. Paradoxically, Eileen seems most loving and most deeply attached to him as he becomes less able to respond.

Despite the grim subject matter, the writing is perceptive and never maudlin. Thomas maintains a straightforward style much like Eileen’s own, though, for 21 hours of listening, I’d like a little more story, and occasional plotlines seemed nonessential, like Eileen’s improbable and expensive drift into the orbit of a faith-healer.

Other reviewers have praised this book highly, and it has many strengths in the writing that made me want to stick with it. I freely admit I’m not a big fan of relationship novels, so that may account for my cooler response. While it is lauded for its depiction of late 20th century mores, to me it is more significant as a cautionary tale of what can go wrong in our lives and relationships while our attention is elsewhere.

Spooky Reads

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haunted house

(photo: Sean MacEntee, creative commons license)

The book-obsessed websites haven’t overlooked the opportunity to capitalize on the scary underpinnings of the Halloween season. A reader poll by the folks at BookRiot yielded this top 10 list, with The Shining scariest of all:

  • The Shining by Stephen King
  • It by Stephen King
  • Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
  • The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King
  • House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  • The Stand by Stephen King
  • Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
  • Bird Box by Joshua Malerman

When you recall that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, that family has lock on half the fright mindshare.

Not surprisingly, The American Scholar takes a more high-brow approach to its list of “Spooktacular Books,” with the only overlaps House of Leaves and The Haunting of Hill House.

No time to read whole books? Jonathan Sturgeon, writing for Flavorwire, has assembled 30 of the scariest moments from Western literature—going all the way back to 760 BCE. Once again, Shirley Jackson and Hill House make the bloody cut.

Literary Duds & Decor for Halloween

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Halloween is just another opportunity to strut your literary predilections. Here’s a roundup of clever ideas that have crossed my desk this month.

pumpkin, book art

(photo: Topeka Library, creative commons license)

  • Turn books into Halloween art pieces – pulp fiction, 3-D constructions, collage, bent, torn, printed on—books can do more than sit on shelves
  • Jack o’ lanterns for readers – more Maurice Sendak than Jane Austen, but still . . . you know where the wild things are, and so will the neighbors!
  • Easy-to-challenging costumes – is the need “to die your hair” a bit too Freudian a slip? And for the Lizbeth Salander costume, find someone delicious to draw that dragon on your back!
  • Then check to see whether your costume idea is being overdone in your area with Google’s Frightgeist!
  • Miss Havisham

    “Did you hear that?” asks Miss Havisham.

    It may be more practical to look to short stories for costume inspiration (fewer people have probably read them)

  • But if you’d rather focus your creativity on writing, here’s a list of horror fiction ideas straight from recent news headlines – I have dibs on “Important Ohio bridge infested with thousands of spiders”
  • And a little of everything in this gallery of “literary Halloween” ideas. Love the “Nevermore” wreath.
  • Wearing your best Victorian garb, propping your foot on a pumpkin cushion, settle back to enjoy a “Hyde potion.” Bloody good cocktail, that.

(Thanks to Book Riot, Electric Literature, Pinterest, and HGTV for the inspiration!)

The Witches are Back

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Puritans, Salem witch trials, The Crucible

(photo: Len “Doc” Radin, Creative Commons license)

Right on time for Halloween is a new book about the tragedy of the Salem witch trials. The Witches: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff describes how—at the behest mostly of hysterical young girls—19 men and women in the Massachusetts colony were tried, convicted, and hanged for witchcraft. The punishment for a 75-year-old man was being crushed to death with stones: “More weight,” he legendarily cried. Two guilty dogs also were executed. In other words, plenty of wrongheadedness was going around that has never been satisfactorily explained or completely understood. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, “The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692.”

Schiff’s September 7 New Yorker article about how the Puritans got so far off track focused much attention on the educated members of the colony, who were as caught up in the events as anyone, and especially the role of prominent ministers and intellectuals Cotton Mather and his father Increase, president of Harvard. The two had some different reactions to the hysteria, though Cotton Mather believed “he had made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing?”

It will be interesting to read Schiff’s book to find out to what extent she subscribes—if at all—to various alternative theories about the phenomenon, one of which is that a covetous desire for wealthier Salemites property was at its root. Many years ago, I read Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie, who suffered from Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that can cause an afflicted person to writhe uncontrollably and to appear wild and violent in speech and movement. In an afterword, the author reported genealogical research on Guthrie’s family, which he said revealed his ancestors included several of the condemned witches.

Of course, the practice and perils of the witchhunt haven’t died. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, in the guise of looking back to the late 1600’s, was written to demonstrate how it can reappear wearing modern-day political garb. A thoughtful reconsideration of 1692, such as Schiff’s book provides, is timely anew.

Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs

(photo: wikimedia)

This Danny Boyle biopic (trailer), with a screenplay by the rapid-fire Aaron Sorkin, may not be to everyone’s taste, but I left the theater feeling both emotionally wrung out and strangely energized. Jobs was a complicated man, a visionary regarding the gestalt of the digital world and the devices we use to interact with it. He was not a genius engineer or a software developer, and he was totally unsentimental (and unsympathetic) toward company products past their prime and the employees who worked on them. He never threw anyone a sop, or agreed with them just to get along. As a result, the movie delivers, as Village Voice reviewer Nick Schager says, “a blistering barrage of combative dialog.”

The decision to focus this movie around three product launches—rather than the endless quotidian details that led up to them—was, I think, brilliant. Emotions were at their peak, expectations were highest, and the parameters of success or failure clearest. No case of the dwindles here. The first launch—of the Macintosh—came shortly after the revolutionary 1984 Super Bowl spot and the audience arrived pumped with expectations. The Mac was overpriced and failed miserably, and Jobs lost his job. The second launch from Jobs’s new company—the NeXT—was another flop. And the third, the 1998 introduction of the iMac? Well, the third time’s the charm. Yes, he was impossibly demanding and ruthlessly critical, but would another personality, making subtle compromises all along the line have achieved as much?

I did not read Walter Isaacson’s eponymous 2011 biography, so was left with some questions about the balance of information presented. It would be obviously impossible to condense all the arguments, recriminations, and flashbacks we see on film into the final few minutes before a product launch—there wouldn’t be time—but that was cinematic license. What I couldn’t assess was whether his daughter Lisa was actually such a significant part of his life, though I understand the filmmakers’ impulse to humanize him through his interactions with her; nor do I know whether Joanna Hoffman was really his conscience over such a long period of time. If so, I bow down in respect to her. The credits do indicate license was taken in fictionalizing some characters and events.

Despite overall positive reviews—Variety calls it “strikingly literate” and “a brilliant film,” the movie is not doing well at the box office. Perhaps this is because the main character isn’t seen as “likeable”—in direct contrast to the Tom Hanks character in Bridge of Spies, reviewed here yesterday. Perhaps Michael Fassbender is not yet a bankable name, and ditto re Hanks.

Certainly the cast was well up to the task. As Jobs, Fassbender is passionate about product and icy about people; Kate Winslet plays the long-suffering Hoffman with the slightest East European accent; Seth Rogen is the passed over Steve Wozniak; and Michael Stuhlbarg, the oft-berated, yet mostly bouncing back programmer Andy Hertzfeld. Jeff Daniels is John Sculley, who replaced Jobs as a more avuncular head of Apple and who, eventually, was fired himself as the company lurched toward bankruptcy. His departure paved the way for the emperor’s triumphant return.

The script includes some of Jobs’s famous aspirational and inspirational quotes. I have one—not used in the film—over my desk. It says “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Words he clearly lived by.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences 79%.