"All we have photographically of the Cuyahoga fire in '69 is pictures of firemen mopping up, spraying the trestle, and then Carl Stokes, the mayor, on the tracks the next morning talking to the press about it," says David Stradling, professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, US. Earlier images of fires on the same river, such as that pictured above in 1952, nevertheless began to be circulated when the 1969 blaze occurred.
And yet, this short-lived fire on the Cuyahoga River became a powerful moment in the growing environmental activism movement in the United States. The images of the river's previous fires ignited national conversations on pollution and social justice, just as the US's nascent environmental movement was gathering pace.
Volumes of a writer’s selected or collected work usually have a kind of a grandness to them, an authoritative summing up that pretends to the definitive, and are the outcome of retrospective weighing: the author, if they have made the selections, or a custodian of their work — spouse, editor, literary executor — has looked at years of production and decided that these writings will stand for what the writer and their work was. You can go further into their corpus and search out the oddities, the minor, the incomplete and occasional, the neglected, but this material before you is the main substance — it will offer the most up-front and prepossessing (some might say imploring) portrait, a testament, for better or worse, of what is past and aspires toward the enduring, a record colored and oddly shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of a particular mind either deceased or soon-to-be. And there, I’m not out of the first paragraph and mortality has entered, though I’d intended to hold it off longer. But how not to remark the truly remarkable fact that Cynthia Ozick, who has just published In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays, is ninety-seven years old?
Falling for Saigon is a different kind of book, as the title suggests. From the first pages, Stokes makes clear that this is his personal—informed but impressionistic—take on a city he’s come to love, in a country where he’s lived for 25 years. The legacy of war comes up in passing but does not take center stage, nor, Stokes implies, should it. “Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, whichever name you call it, contradicts itself. For it is large and contains multitudes,” he writes.