The Law of Dreams

May 22, 2006
Screenwriter Behrens follows his 1987 story collection, Night Driving
, with an ambitious epic that follows a hapless wee lad from the rotten potato fields of 1847 Ireland to a New England horse ranch. Fergus O'Brien, the teenage son of a tenant farmer, is sent to a workhouse after his parents are murdered. He quickly escapes, joins a band of brigands and, after raiding his former landlord's farm, drifts to Dublin and then to Liverpool, where he is primed to work as a "pearl boy" (read: male prostitute). He hits the road again, this time settling in Wales, where he works on a rail line and meets Red Molly, a married woman who becomes his lover and traveling companion to America, where he plans to become a horse trader. The book veers dangerously close to melodrama on more than a few occasions, and Fergus, for all the contretemps encountered and indignities suffered, remains thin and unconvincing as a narrator. But readers may be able to overlook Behrens's authorial missteps and enjoy the sprawling, cinematically rendered immigrant story.

July 10, 2006
Smith, a sailor and author of How the Great Pyramid Was Built,
intersperses occasionally dry explanations of the complex physics of waves with harrowing tales of modern-day maritime tragedies. He enumerates the natural forces that create waves: the moon's gravity pulls on the oceans; Earth's rotation pushes them; the sun heats them; the wind tugs against their surface; and earthquakes displace them. The resulting waves can propagate from one side of the ocean to the other. Waves from one storm race outward to interact with waves from another, while converging ocean currents force them even higher or flatten them out completely. The complexity of it beggars the imagination. In modern times, Smith says, with the importance of shipping and the growth of off-shore drilling platforms, understanding waves is more vital than ever—we must especially understand extreme, or rogue, waves that seem to appear out of nowhere and tower over 100 feet high. In a chapter on the 2004 tsunami, Smith recounts the harrowing experience of two scuba divers caught in the maelstrom and suggests California could be at risk for a future tsunami. Science is only beginning to understand tsunamis, hurricanes and rogue waves, and Smith's book is for readers who want a serious scientific look at what we're learning. Illus.