Quammen Saves the Day

I spent most of last week interviewing law students for summer positions with my firm. For the uninitiated, this process is something like picking your nose. You know what you are going to get but persist nonetheless. Some interviews are uglier than others. I could go on but you get the picture.
One small (and somewhat cruel) pleasure lies in the questioning. Many of these kids (and the exceptions are usually the ones who are NOT kids) remind me of Rubashov toward the end of Darkness at Noon when they enter the interview room. Start them off with something easy, say a question about their resume, and they unclench a bit. But open with a monster like "What is the biggest mistake you've made" or "Tell me about your mother" (I unloaded that one toward the end of a long, long day last year, with predictably grim results) and the dry heaves start.
Which is why I was astonished that the interesting (to me), somewhat innocuous question that lead off many of my interviews last week provoked such unmistakable angst. It appears that "What is the best book you've read recently? Or over the last several years?" is the conversational equivalent of unzipping and laying it on the table. Those who could answer often chose a Dan Brown novel (and were immediately cut) or Harry Potter (I'm not a fan but do understand the appeal so no points were deducted). To digress for a moment, and hopefully provoke some outraged and grammatically suspect comment, isn't a subscription to US Weekly cheaper than a hardcover copy of "The Da Vinci Code"? And don't they basically amount to the same thing? Just asking.
Anyway, the ostensible point of the question was to see who these people were outside of law school. The more important point, though, was to make them pimp for me and troll for some good recommendations. During the drive back to the office, my fellow interviewers and I discussed our own answers to the questions we'd posed. I thought I would throw one out to whatever audience Tripp has earned and - this time sincerely - hope for some reciprocation.
One of the best books that I've read recently (and I'm stretching that term because I really want to recommend this one) is David Quammen's "The Boilerplate Rhino." Quammen is a nature essayist with the heart of a poet and the writing chops of, well, someone a hell of a lot better than I. "Boilerplate" is the final collection of columns that he wrote for Outside magazine under the title "Natural Acts." To describe him as a science writer is a slight. Early in this volume he writes of a childhood fixation "I don't bother to wonder why I remember such tiny details after almost twenty years. Memory is memory and, like love, knows no logic." A passage from his latest work "Monster of God" is worth quoting at length. Quammen has just spent several days with a Romanian shepherd (really), doing some rather loose field research on Romanian brown bears (picture mean grizzlies) but really just hanging out in the Transylvanian Alps. The Muskrat Conundrum is Quammen's shorthand for his theory (pretty well supported) that the burdens imposed by alpha predators such as Romanian brown bears are borne disporportionately by the poor, while the benefits accrue principally to those of us wealthy enough to subscribe to National Geographic and view a vegetarian diet as an informed choice. The money shot:
Would it be better, I ask, if there were no bears at all? Well, better for him, yes, it would be. But the bear, it's podoaba padurii, the treasure of the forest. "If you lose this, you lose the treasure," he says. "A forest without bears - it's empty."
Not all shepherds see it that way, I tell him. He agrees, noting that most people who claim to like bears are gentlefolk. They live far away, he says, with no bear troubles of their own. Easy for them. Shepherds, plain men at work in the mountains, don't enjoy such distance. Their attitude tends to be la naiba cu ursii, to hell with the bears.
Here it is again, then: the Muskrat Conundrum. Ion Dinca doesn't call it by that label, of course, nor does he draw any parallels between the predator problems of Romanian shepherds and those of vulnerable, marginalized, rural people elsewhere. He doesn't even explain why, despite living the life of an unsheltered muskrat himself, he holds a more appreciative view of the creature that plays the role of the mink. He's simply a man of transparent and generous spirit. As we sit talking, the neck bells on his leader sheep toll soothingly, cloonka cloonka cloonka, in the rhythm of their waddle across the slope. Life is good, life is hard, life is enriched by complications and - he seems to feel - so it should be. A forest without bears is empty.
I'm going to stop now to read some Quammen. And forget about law students for a while.