August 14, 2007 | About Last Night

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from Katharine Weber, whose fascinating novel Triangle is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.
I was a morbid child, they (teachers, my mother) said. My favorite moments in the relatively sunny Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” books were the near-death of the entire family in the “Fever and Ague” chapter in Little House on the Prairie
and the threat of starvation in The Long Winter . My Ordeal by Hunger Donner Party book report in sixth grade was deemed tomboyish and strange by most of my classmates (the boy before me reported on a biography of Thomas Edison and the girl after me reported on My Friend Flicka). My Evanston relatives were impatient with my wishes to visit landmarks to feed my Chicago Fire fascination. Whenever I had a cold I would try to suppress my coughing the way Anne Frank in her secret annex had to, during office hours. I was a font of Titanic trivia long before Leonardo DiCaprio was born. Maybe feasting on all that disaster helped my own chaotic childhood feel comparatively safe and organized. Maybe all those disaster books were like survival handbooks for me, illuminating my private secret sense that I could have endured and managed to find my way through those events; surely I would have been one of the canny ones, equipped with fine-tuned survival instincts.
1. Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George Stewart. The very words “Donner Party” offer a frisson of horror and then a snicker you don’t want to own, because you don’t quite know what to do with that incongruently festive designation. Bad decisions, snow, worse decisions, more snow, bad luck, more snow, and then comes the cannibalism you anticipate from the first page.
2. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. Who cares if the prose is merely adequate when the story is among the best tragedies in the history of the civilization? This is the definitive account for those of us who prefer our Titanic the way she was last seen, strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (probably) wafting from the strings of the heroic musicians who played on the deck until the end, when the ship upended and slid to the bottom of the sea. Lord’s book was published the year I was born, many decades before technology could dilute the mystery by providing salvage loot and glimpses of that sad rusting hulk on the ocean floor (not to mention a terrible framing device for that movie).
3. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury. Endless winter plus starvation and cannibalism, plus Nazi atrocities — so many of my favorite obsessions are represented in this stirring, majestic book.
4. The Circus Fire: The True Story of an American Tragedy by Stewart O’Nan. Circuses and clowns are creepy anyway, even without a conflagration. The horrific 1944 Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford that killed nearly 170 people, more than half of them children, took only a few minutes to ignite, because the immense circus tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline. As the tent went up in flames, the waterproofing mixture rained down on the crowd of some eight thousand souls like napalm. Adding to the mystery and horror, several of the children were never identified, most famously the eerily beautiful Little Miss 1565. This elegant account, which gets my vote for best Stewart O’Nan book, is informed by dozens of interviews with survivors of the fire. Many of them described the hideous, unforgettable sounds of the trapped animals burning. The eerie still point at the heart of the book is when O’Nan follows the eyewitness accounts of the animals screaming with the quiet statement that no animals were burned in the fire.
5. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. Ambition, hubris, bravery, selfishness, death, and a bizarre cast of characters. An irresistible, horrible sequence of events with all the elements of a thriller, this is a book that succeeds because Krakauer tells the story with clarity and insight.

“Popular art is dominated throughout by the star system, not only in its actors but in all its elements, whatever the medium. Every work of art, to be sure, has its dominant elements, to which the rest are subordinate. But in popular art it is the dominant ones alone that are the objects of interest, the ground of its satisfaction. By contrast, great art is in this sense pointless; everything in it is significant, everything makes its own contribution to the aesthetic substance. The domain of popular art is, paradoxically, an aristocracy, as it were: some few elements are singled out as the carriers of whatever meaning the work has while the rest are submerged into an anonymous mass. The life of the country is reduced to the mannered gestures of its king. It is this that gives the effect of simplification and standardization.”
Abraham Kaplan, “Aesthetics of the Popular Arts”