The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel, by Eric Idle; Pantheon, $24
By Emily Gordon
Consider the question: What makes Monty Python so funny? Before you run for cover, fearing bands of TV-mad academics and 12-year- olds with the complete script of “Dead Parrot” at the ready, ponder this analysis: “Five limeys and a Yank. No girls; they did drag. Typical Brits. They’re never happier than when dressing up as women. . . . It’s all very silly nonsense. They seem dangerously cuckoo to me.”
This dismissal – written by the fictional Professor William Reynolds at the end of the 25th century – is the work of master Python Eric Idle. His new novel, The Road to Mars, brings the philosophy of humor into the future – which, in Idle’s vision, is populated by almost-human robots, divas with an intergalactic audience that puts Murdoch and Turner to shame, cruiselike spaceships with enough live entertainment to last a light-year and your garden- variety stand-up comics.
The philosophy part of it all is the preoccupation of Professor Reynolds, who’s actually narrating a story that takes place 80 years earlier, in the late 2300s. Way back then, a robot named Carlton puts a lot of work into a dissertation on what makes humans laugh. He calls it De Rerum Comoedia: A Discourse on Humor, and by the time he’s done, he feels (or thinks, anyway) that he’s hit upon the Unified Theory of Everything.
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This fascinates Carlton because of whose droid he is: two comedians, Alex Muscroft (the short, manic one) and Lewis Ashby (the tall, laconic one). In fact, Carlton concludes excitedly, if his calculations and deductions about comedy are right, “Now they might not even have to do it anymore.” But Reynolds, having discovered this treatise in some abandoned university files, has a nefarious plan to use Carlton’s conclusions for his own fame (and to win back his fickle girlfriend).
The bulk of the novel, though, concerns the adventures of Muscroft and Ashby, as they’re known on the circuit, and their run-ins with a host of sci-fi personalities: the villainous ship’s captain, the beautiful woman with a habit of flirting with men and then planting explosive cybermines on the premises, the mysterious old man from a renegade planet and, of course, the ubiquitous diva whose ego and sense of hubris could easily eclipse the sun.
Stuff blows up; people pop into History Bars, where the 20th century is undergoing a kitschy revival; wisecracks abound, and all the while, Carlton, “tintellectual” extraordinaire, is trying to make sense of it even though, as his Oz counterpart lacked a heart, he’s minus a funny bone. All of this is, as the hapless Professor Reynolds would say, very silly nonsense. But like everyone with a shipshape sense of humor, Idle knows not to take himself too seriously. The Road to Mars has the quality of the gently nutty Python sketches – the proper newscaster oblivious to the tide coming in, the broad satire of the courtroom scenes, the surreal animation – rather than the pure brilliant rage of a John Cleese explosion.
But if there were only one way to make humans laugh, the world would be a very dismal place indeed. Eric Idle makes sure it isn’t.
Chicago Sun-Times, September 9, 1999 (originally published in Newsday)

Identity switching is the name of clever game in `Dropping’
By Emily Gordon
Newsday
Thursday, July 20, 2000
Name Dropping. By Jane Heller. St. Martin’s. 327 pages. $24.95.
If you’ve ever cyberstalked yourself, you know how unsettling it can be to discover all the people who share your name. Such is the sticky situation involving the heroine of Jane Heller’s “Name Dropping,” a Regular Gal in New York City who discovers that right in her building there is an Un-Regular Gal with, you guessed it, the same name.
Nancy Stern, Ms. Ordinary, is a divorced, 30-something teacher who tends overprivileged, underloved children at the Small Blessings nursery school; she spends her days “convincing four-year-olds that nose-picking, while not an inherently bad thing, is nevertheless a poor choice when socializing with others.” She and her best friend, fellow teacher Janice, fret about singlehood and surf the Web together. She lives in 6J.
The other Nancy Stern, by contrast, is a veritable Holly Golightly, juggling lovers, freshly dry-cleaned furs and invitations to the U.N., private screenings with Harrison Ford and the like. She is a freelance writer, which as we all know is a very glamorous job. She lives in the penthouse — 24A. Understandably, their mail keeps getting mixed up, and soon enough Ms. Ordinary is trotting up to 24J with stuff for Ms. Fancypants (a dozen roses from “Jacques,” $10,000 Visa bills, personal notes from Kevin Costner, Prozac). Our Nancy is at first irritated, then increasingly fascinated with her neighbor’s glamorous life.
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The interest isn’t returned. Freelancer Nancy, resplendent in white cashmere and leather gloves, is quite a sourpatch: She says condescending things to her namesake, such as “You’re quite the competent little message taker. . . . How’d you like to be my executive secretary for a living instead of baby-sitting people’s brats?” How rude!
But soon Ms. Fancypants is more than rude — she’s dead. As police scour the building for clues to the brutal killing, “the lesser of the two Nancy Sterns” is riddled with confusion and worry. She didn’t just fantasize about the other Nancy’s existence; she actually wriggled herself into it, by accepting a blind date from a man who’d called for the Nancy in 24A.
The man, Bill Harris, turns out to be a serious catch: He’s tall, sexy, works as a manager at a high-class jewelry store, loves his two kids and concedes that “men can be louses.” But the more attached they become, the more our Nancy realizes the sham is unfair to Bill, who’s from a family of cops and treasures honesty above all else. She ends the romance, leaving both of them heartbroken. Then Upstairs Nancy gets bumped off, and our Nancy freaks out: Once Bill reads the newspapers, he’ll know what a weirdo she is, and hate her even more.
That doesn’t happen, though. I won’t reveal any more of the ensuing hair-raising plot, except that it involves jewel scams, steamy scenes, Home Depot, a Latvian nanny, pirates, a detective named Burt Reynolds and sly digs at author Sue Grafton.
Florida resident Heller makes some funny big-city gaffes and her style veers from spirited and clever to overly familiar. But “Name Dropping” is a tasty snack you’ll gobble up.
(This story was originally published in a somewhat different form.)

Celebrating du Maurier’s ornery genius
By Emily Gordon
Sunday, February 6, 2000
Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress. By Nina Auerbach. University of Pennsylvania Press. 180 pages. $24.95.
The very name of Daphne du Maurier brings with it a gothic tremble, a pungent, unsettling perfume. It calls up a world at once lofty and macabre — not unlike Manderley, the gorgeous trap of a mansion in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” the 1940 film adapted from the novelist’s best-known book.
But du Maurier, who died in 1989, was no Lady Novelist, fastidious, proper and accommodating. Rather, as scholar Nina Auerbach makes admirably clear in a new study of du Maurier’s life and career, she was an upper-crust, ornery, sexually ambiguous snob who also wrote superb fiction.
The cruel joke, as Auerbach argues, is that the only works that are even vaguely familiar to modern readers — “Rebecca,” “My Cousin Rachel” and other female-centered novels and stories — are also her least compelling.
Indeed, as Auerbach goes on to demonstrate, du Maurier wrote her best fiction about powerful men.
“Throughout Daphne du Maurier’s novels,” Auerbach writes, “the falls of men are more compelling than those of women because her men have everything to lose while women are humbled by definition.”
Thus, now-forgotten novels like “Hungry Hill” and “The Scapegoat” are miles better than, say, “Rebecca,” with its spooked, wilting narrator and dead heroine.
Furthermore, du Maurier the person was considerably more complex and self-contradictory than many readers have assumed.
Though a relentless and unsentimental family historian, her own autobiographical works are notably devoid of modern memoirs’ seamy detail — a restraint Auerbach admires. Still, there are a few juicy bits in “Haunted Heiress,” including du Maurier’s affairs with Ellen Doubleday (her publisher’s wife) and actress Gertrude Lawrence.
What Auerbach does disclose of her subject’s character doesn’t always inspire admiration. But she never feels the need to conceal her ambivalence about, in her unapologetic description, this “strange writer and unlikable woman.”
She loathes du Maurier’s crypto-fascist politics, and lets us know it; the novelist’s preferential treatment of the men in both her life and her books makes Auerbach itchy.
Yet in her open intelligence about the inevitable conflicts that a strong personality will produce in both scholar and devotee, Auerbach somehow ends up making the reader more sympathetic to her celebration of du Maurier’s decidedly ungothic realism, and ultimately more interested in reading du Maurier.
“I like surprises in my life, in my friends, and in the narrators of novels I read,” she writes with characteristic candor. “I gravitate to evasion of categories and, in fiction and life, escape from plot conventions.”
It’s clear, then, that “The Haunted Heiress” is not a conventional biography, nor a traditional academic monograph.
Throughout, there are informal asides and second-guessings that would never appear in a more standard academic text.
This relatively loose structure allows for the inclusion of odd, provocative connections: between, say, the metaphoric connections between du Maurier’s grandfather’s trade as a glass-blower, the fragile Glasses of Salinger fame and “The Glass Menagerie.” There is also an engaging chapter devoted solely to describing and critiquing the numerous films made of du Maurier’s books and stories (including, of course, “The Birds”).
Auerbach employs plenty of traditional, albeit cranky, literary criticism here along with the psychoanalytic speculation and ’50s flashbacks.
Without descending into jargon, she roots out the themes — including the “doubleness and self-fabrication” that plagued the du Maurier family; ghosts and potent ancestors; shades of incest; boyish girls and Peter Pans; tragic epigones and so on — that recur throughout du Maurier’s work.
And so, at long last, Auerbach banishes the malign image of Daphne du Maurier, Romance Novelist.
“Romance is inherently a soothing and tender genre that aims to reconcile women to traditional lives whose common denominator is home,” she writes, within a description of some particularly bitter denouements. “I find it odd and ironic that such brutal depictions of emptiness should be given the label `romance.’ ”
In the end, Auerbach manages to make the now-standard rescue of an unjustly pigeonholed woman writer newly outrageous and winsomely fresh. To paraphrase “Rebecca’s” wan narrator, we can never go back to du Maurier again — at least not the du Maurier we thought we knew. Thank God for that.
(Originally published in Newsday; reprinted in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

TALKING WITH LAURA JACOBS / Finding the Light Touch
By Emily Gordon
It was time to get out of the audience. After years of writing about other people’s art, longtime critic and Vanity Fair contributing editor Laura Jacobs has taken the stage with a stylish, gutsy first novel. Women About Town (Viking, $23.95) tells the stories of two New York women who share Jacobs’ sensibilities and some of her history: Iris, 40, a high-end lamp-shade designer who’s divorced, and Lana, 34, a freelance arts critic balancing work, precarious friendships and a relationship that may or may not be going anywhere.
Jacobs alternates between Iris and Lana as they, in different ways, take the city by storm and negotiate their social and internal worlds. This gives readers, as Jacobs notes, two chances to identify with a heroine. “I took a certain side of myself for Lana, and then another side of myself for Iris,” she says, pouring Prosecco in her Manhattan apartment, a feast of beautiful objects and equally beautiful cats (three spotted ocicats, bred to look like little ocelots). “And I put them both in the Petri dish and let them both grow.”
Jacobs, who embodies both Midwestern openness and New York elan, grew up in a northwest suburb of Chicago. After college, she got a job as an editor at Stagebill magazine, the performing-arts publication. Using Stagebill — where she eventually became editor in chief — as a base, she wrote freelance dance criticism in several cities until she moved to New York.
But Jacobs was destined to add more to her repertoire. She wrote two fashion pieces for a British paper that caught the eye of The New Republic and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. Soon she was writing about fashion for both magazines; she’s since composed the text for books about Geoffrey Beene and Barbie. She reflects, “Vanity Fair pushed me to do these big, overarching profiles” — of great designers like Norman Norell and Mainbocher as well as stars from Cate Blanchett to Emily Post — “and really, you have to have a sense of story to do a life, and I think that’s where I got the idea I could tell a story.”
Along the way, Jacobs married Vanity Fair media columnist James Wolcott. He was the first reader of “Women About Town”: About five years ago, she says, “I used to sit down after work at the computer with a martini while Jim was watching ‘Crossfire’ and all that, and do what I would call a cocktail-hour poem. And then one day I just thought, this isn’t working for me. I think I’ll try to write a scene … And I took it in to Jim after I’d finished and I said, ‘What do you think of this?’ He read it and he loved it … And so I just kept doing it whenever the spirit moved me, and I felt like I had found a new kind of air to fly in.”
“Women About Town” is about, among other things, the often fraught romance of female friendship. Indeed, it deliberately keeps Iris’ and Lana’s relationships with men in the background: “It was a conscious decision I made from the start. I thought, there are enough novels out there about women hunting down men, pursuing, pursuing. And my experience of New York City is that — well, yes, if you’re single here, you do want to meet a man and fall in love, but that is just one small section of the pie. You have so much else going on in your day to stay the course in New York City … And I really think that relationships between women are so complex, and interesting, and fascinating. So much great art is about women, and I think there’s a reason for that.”
She tends to stick with the classics in her own fiction reading, though “the one writer I read a lot when I was writing the book was Nancy Mitford, because I just love that light touch – and I really wanted to stay light, which is not to say I didn’t want moments of depth or deep feeling, but I wanted to get at them in a different way. There’s so much that we keep below the surface in our lives — we aren’t always spewing out emotions and feelings, but we still feel deeply. I wanted that. I wanted to create something that was a pleasure to read.”
Is another novel in the works? “I have started another one, because it’s so much fun! I love criticism, I love writing dance criticism, and I love the historical research for the pieces I do for Vanity Fair, but there is nothing as liberating as fiction. I never knew that.”
She finds another form of freedom in bird-watching, which she’s been doing for about eight years; she’s one of the tenders at the Riverside Park Bird Sanctuary and leads bird walks there. She keeps lists of the birds she spots: “The more you know … the higher your standard for what you need to know is, and you want to identify everything. And I think there’s a corollary [to] that in writing. You want to be able to write exactly what that emotion feels like, more and more specific, but in a fresh way, where it’s not belabored. That’s what it’s all about, in any pursuit — about concentration, energy, freshness.”
Published June 30, 2002
Note: Jacobs’s second novel is The Bird Catcher.

Bad Boys and Little Sisters
WILD KIDS: Two Novels About Growing Up, by Chang Ta-chun. Translated by Michael Berry. Columbia University Press, 257 pp., $22.95.
By Emily Gordon
LORD KNOWS there are few other compensations, but it is the privilege of writers to make things up — lying when convenient, and populating whole planets out of dust. “What I mean is that everyday life frequently puts people in a position where they have no choice but to tell a small untruth. I don’t like to do it, but sometimes that’s how things go. And so, I became a writer.” So says the narrator of “My Kid Sister,” the novella that makes up half of Chang Ta-chun’s “Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up.” Chang’s characters are masters of invention; they skirt death by talking, like Scheherezade, or like the king in a fable that the same narrator’s girlfriend recounts, who’ll achieve immortality if he can put 100 concubines to sleep with his storytelling.
There lies Chang’s joke, and his genius. Writing is clearly sustenance and survival for him-in his native Taiwan he’s conquered nearly every literary genre and created at least one entirely new form, not to mention a pseudonymous persona, Big Head Spring (Datou Chun), who’s busy putting out books of his own, including this one — but it’s also something he doesn’t take overly seriously. Both “My Kid Sister,” a tale of two siblings that crackles with irreverent wit, and “Wild Child,” the story of a middle-school truant’s trip into a decidedly B-list gangster underworld, take conventional ideas of narrative and character and throw them in the air like Pick-Up Stix that land in an anarchic yet oddly geometric clatter.
The older brother in “My Kid Sister” (that is, the grown-up Big Head Spring) is a writer who plunders his childhood experiences and his friends’ lives for material, and who’s spent time in the army. Probably not coincidentally, this is also true of Chang Ta-chun — who, as translator Michael Berry tells us in his somewhat heavy-footed introduction, went from military service to massive success in Taiwan with his semi-autobiographical and political fiction. Memoir or not (the dedication is “for my sister…It was her courage in facing the viciousness of reality that provided the abundance of precious material used in the writing of this book. As for my grandparents, parents, and everyone else, they don’t necessarily have either the interest or the ability to understand this rather unsubstantial work”), this is a gorgeous story, despite its narrator’s blustery crudeness and profanity, and its subject’s tendency to slip out of our grasp like a minnow each time we think we finally have her.
Berry compares the theme of “Wild Child” – a boy runs away from school, has adventures and comes into his own-to that of “Catcher in the Rye,” but if anyone sounds Salingerish, it’s “My Kid Sister’s” Phoebe-like heroine, who doesn’t speak till she’s 2 years old and indeed is diagnosed autistic by the family doctor. She’s not autistic, as it turns out, but she does behave and speak oddly; this further endears her to her protective older brother, and throughout the novella (or whatever it is), she moves through his life commenting on and being affected by it. She bombards him with intimate questions about his girlfriends; she develops a hopeless crush on his female tutor; they plot public revenge on their wandering father for neglecting their manic-depressive, distilled-water-addicted mother; when the sister gets pregnant as a teenager, her brother consoles her after the abortion.
But Holden would have been scandalized by this older brother, whose view of life is many shades darker and much rougher than his, who calls women “chicks” and can say of a lover who begs him to write about her life that “her story is pretty much the same as everyone else in the world’s story. The main character experiences something and afterward is unable to recover or return to the way things were … These allow the main character to discover that living is but the accumulation of a series of death experiences; we experience a day of life just to realize that we are unable to return to yesterday’s life. When the character realizes this, he feels terribly sad … Even sadder is the fact that in reality, he or she was never any kind of a main character.”
Better to compare this terrain to Philip Roth’s; our hero is obsessed with the profane, but he’s equally preoccupied with the divine, and spiritual and bawdy questions lie unashamedly together. Freud and Sartre, suffice it to say, have more than cameos here (though, the brother admits with customary drollness, “I never had the ability to go head-to-head with Freud on anything”). For him, his sister embodies everything female – early in her adolescence he finds himself noticing her curves and is fascinated and ashamed-and idealized, the charm of innocence and nobility of soul.
Though Big Head Spring — whose 1992 book of fictional journal entries was a best-seller-is the purported author of both of these novellas, it’s in “Wild Child” that his famous rebelliousness is in full flower. Here, young Big Head plays hooky and falls in with a band of shadowy gangsters, led by the fearless Annie, who talk like James M. Cain, live like Dickens’ pickpockets and aspire to Mario Puzo, but act more like Chester Himes’ small-time lowlifes. “All that is left in this world are gang leaders, good-for-nothings, and dead people. Teenagers are already a thing of the past,” Big Head begins, and he means it. Where “My Kid Sister” is loving and meditative, “Wild Child” is violent and cynical, though it has many tender and comic moments. (“If I keep carrying on about how much it hurt, how much pain I was in, I could ramble on for two and a half hours, but other than proving how big of a chicken I am, what would be the point of that?”) It’s ultimately a less pleasurable read than its companion, but Big Head is a character worth knowing, and I want more of him.
In both novellas, Chang also leapfrogs into Milan Kundera country, giving philosophical journeys (both ridiculous and profound) equal pride of place with character and events. But don’t think that means there’s anything ponderous about the ghoulish, playful, totally subversive “Wild Kids,” which is enchanting in its portrait of being young in modern Taiwan-where Michael Jordan is as important as the ghosts of ancestors, and a grandmother switches off her Gameboy to cook Fried Rose Petal Paste — and which deserves to make Chang as much of an icon in English as he is in Chinese.
Published September 17, 2000

Aug 29, 2004
Healing the Victorians
By Emily Gordon
NIGHTINGALES: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale, by Gillian Gill. Ballantine, 535 pp., $27.95.
Imagine a day when people will sweep the decades of your lifetime into a single catchphrase. History, by necessity, tends to blur nuance, make complex figures into icons and cram generations of people into a cartoon phone booth of generalization.
And so, to hold the official line, “the Victorians” were prissy, politically conservative and socially conventional. Indeed, the subjects of Gillian Gill’s extraordinary new memoir-history were often conventional.
Yet Florence Nightingale, the most famous member of the extended family Gill describes, was anything but prim. It’s true that she was a pioneer nurse, but, as Gill makes sure we understand, there wasn’t much that either doctors or nurses could do within a theory of medicine that relied on leeches, amputation, bloodletting, purges, opiates and medications based on heavy metals and alcohol and was as likely to kill its patients as cure them.
Nightingale (1820-1910) was a pioneer of far more than nursing. She revolutionized scholarship, teaching (her best-known book, “Notes on Nursing,” is still in print in 11 languages), sanitation, statistics, political activism and institutional organization.
She took a democratic approach to medical treatment that was almost unheard of and changed the definition of what women were fit to do: When Nightingale set out on her career, nursing was considered — especially by the upper classes — to be the occupation of drunks, slatterns and whores. And while she believed that a Christian God had called her to serve the sick instead of marrying, she lived among, touched and comforted humans at their most disgusting and desperate, regardless of their birth or religion, and despised those who let class or religious prejudices interfere with their duty to try to save as many lives as they could.
Neither is the rest of Nightingale’s family so easily tagged. “In some ways, of course, to be odd was to be typically Victorian,” Gill remarks in her introduction. One might guess, for instance, that it was the adventurous young Florence who, on long family expeditions abroad, negotiated muddy roads and highwaymen and clambered down mines. But no – that was Florence’s mother, Fanny Smith Nightingale, who later became one of the forces working hardest against her daughter’s urgent independence.
Similarly, what kind of caddish degenerate would assemble the definitive collection of sadomasochistic pornography for all his friends to sample when they visited? Why, Florence’s spurned gentleman suitor (and cousin), Richard Monckton Milnes.
And weren’t Victorian fathers supposed to more or less ignore their children, especially privileged daughters who were raised primarily to be good wives and producers of male heirs? William Edward Nightingale, Florence’s father (known as WEN), took the time to give them Oxford-worthy educations himself.
Then, which of the two sisters — Florence or her older, frequently sickly sister, Parthenope – retreated to bed at the age of 37 and stayed there for decades in a depressed and painful slump, refusing family visitors and barely venturing outside? That would be Florence, who had spent nearly a year on a death-defying trip down the Nile and 21 months staging her justly famous turnaround of the Barrack Hospital in Constantinople amid the hell of the Crimean War.
The whole family was rife with contradictions. Despite a seemingly infinite tolerance for dying patients, perpetually ill neighbors and “hospital” rooms crawling with rats and lice, Florence could also be pigheaded, fussy, selfish and thoughtless with the far less fortunate Parthenope. She was prone to red-hot friendships that sometimes ended with a cold guillotine, and she occasionally made illogical judgments out of pride or resentment. In short, she was human.
But why document an entire family — indeed, an entire society? There are other biographies of Florence Nightingale (not least of which is the ambivalent chapter in Bloomsbury critic Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians”). Here, Gill stresses “the degree to which [the family] identified themselves as members of a group rather than as isolated individuals.” Equally important, progressive ideas dated back generations through the family’s Dissenting Protestant and Unitarian roots. As Gill underscores, “Family traits and traditions do not die, even if they go unexpressed for a generation.”
Florence’s own radicalism (and feminism, of a kind) emerged in her reformation of Britain’s entire medical system and fighting the closed and, of course, all-male structure of the English army in doing so. In due course, she won honors and the trust of that ultimate female power broker, Queen Victoria, who exclaimed, “I wish we had her at the War Office!” It might have made a considerable difference.
There’s plenty of juicy material here, and Gill omits no details. Remarkably, in a book so long, she misses few opportunities for making connections and — when appropriate — guesses at what might have been going on under the surface. Admirers of Anthony Trollope will find similar qualities here: meticulous detail in describing both public and private life, a steady hand when people or events get ugly and a genteelly wicked wit throughout.
In the end, of course, for all this careful documentation of this voraciously communicative person’s life, there are many mysteries that the reader will be left to puzzle over even after nearly 600 pages of dense biography and probing by Gill into every ambiguity, often in an engaging first person.
The biographer herself is the first to admit the paradoxical limitation of so much material. What was Florence’s religious calling exactly? How did she reconcile the amorous feelings she must have experienced with her decision to remain alone? (Some biographers make the stretch that she was a lesbian, but Gill rejects the idea after careful consideration.)
What accounts for her harsh rejection of her family in her many years of bedridden illness? What can explain her extreme emotional self-flagellation — what Strachey describes as her mind’s “singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of doubt … [her] self-examination, self-criticism, self-surrender”? And what, exactly, was she ill with for all those years?
In the present, when nothing seems hidden from the public eye, it’s probably useful to remember that self-revelation doesn’t necessarily make for understanding — from either without or within. Decidedly not a suffragist, or quite a New Woman, Florence Nightingale was a curious anomaly in her own time — or, perhaps, the collective ambitions and rebellion of all the women (and quite a few men) of her age in one dazzling figure.
“Through the facts she always saw lives,” Gill writes of Nightingale. The same can be said of the author, who does more than ample justice both to the individual and to that collective striving upward and outward, and in the process achieves an elegant masterwork of her own.