What is James M. Tabor reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: James Tabor, author of Frozen Solid.

Part of his entry:

I just finished reading (literally—this very morning!) Son of the Morning Star, Evan Connell’s exhaustive, discursive, novelistic biography of George Armstrong Custer. I came late to Connell, having read other Custer biographies—most recently, Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand—first. Though tempted to say that was a mistake, in the end I’m glad to have capped my Custer works with Connell. Philbrick is far and away the best of the rest: eminently readable, primary-sourced to a fair-the-well, and painfully accurate. (We learn, among other things, that Custer’s assailants shoved an arrow up his penis, though no one could say whether it was peri- or post-mortem. Also that the gruesome information was not divulged until after Mrs. Custer had died in 1933.)

All that said, I liked Connell better and here’s why. Pure chroniclers in any discipline tend to be linear—Vermeer, Beethoven, Philbrick. There is value in being able to stand in a room in 1658 with Vermeer’s milkmaid (who was not really a milkmaid—she did not pull milk from cows—but a kitchenmaid preparing bread pudding) and know her world exactly, photographically, right down to the heft of her forearm, the folds of her apron, and the holes in her footwarmer on the crumb-scattered floor. As there is in knowing that grim fact about Custer’s corpse and, for example, that no fewer than 105 arrows pierced a cavalry trooper’s body.

Evokers (for lack of a better word)—Monet, Bach, Woolf, our contemporary novelist James Salter (about whom more later), and Connell—tend to be non-linear, suggestive, poetic. A neurosurgeon once told me that autistic children are like great poets in that they make non-linear associations beyond the grasp of “normal” brains. We see “cloud” and think “sky.” They see “cloud” and think “love” or “porpoise” or “window.” While by no means suggesting that Connell was autistic, I did revel in...[read on]

About Frozen Solid, from the publisher:

The most dangerous place on Earth
A devious and deadly plan to save humanity from itself
A lone scientist battling the clock and ruthless enemies to avert global catastrophe

The Deep Zone was hailed as “an absolutely phenomenal read by the new Michael Crichton” (Brad Thor), a book that “should come shrink-wrapped with a seat belt” (Steve Berry). Now, bestselling author James M. Tabor ups the ante and the action in his second extreme thriller, as brilliant and battle-tested heroine Hallie Leland confronts intrigue and murder in the most unforgiving place on Earth.

The South Pole’s Amundsen Scott Research Station is like an outpost on Mars. Winter temperatures average 100 degrees below zero; week-long hurricane-force storms rage; for eight months at a time the station is shrouded in darkness. Under the stress, bodies suffer and minds twist. Panic, paranoia, and hostility prevail.

When a South Pole scientist dies mysteriously, CDC microbiologist Hallie Leland arrives to complete crucial research. Before she can begin, three more women inexplicably die. As failing communications and plunging temperatures cut the station off from the outside world, terror rises and tensions soar. Amidst it all, Hallie must crack the mystery of her predecessor’s death.

In Washington, D.C., government agency director Don Barnard and enigmatic operative Wil Bowman detect troubling signs of shadowy behavior at the South Pole and realize that Hallie is at the heart of it. Unless Barnard and Bowman can track down the mastermind, a horrifying act of global terror, launched from the station, will change the planet forever—and Hallie herself will be the unwitting instrument of destruction.

As the Antarctic winter sweeps in, severing contact with the outside world, Hallie must trust no one, fear everyone, and fight to keep the frigid prison from becoming her frozen grave.

Learn more about the book and author at James M. Tabor's website.

Writers Read: James M. Tabor.

--Marshal Zeringue