Books in Brief: Three Levels of Time

Three Levels of Time, by Harold Hayes (Dutton, 236 pp., $13.50). Harold Hayes, a former editor of Esquire and a gifted journalist, here grapples with the larger questions: Who am I? and, How did I get here? He also considers the “three levels of time” associated with the story: instinct, intelligence, and survival. This is a tall order, but Hayes takes the reader on a ramble filled with historical narrative, interviews with scientists, and the story of a man’s fight for life during the two weeks he is trapped in a wrecked station wagon at the bottom of a mountain ravine. The result is informative and multifarious, but not quite satisfying. Hayes admires John McPhee as a stylist, and that is part of the problem: while Hayes does not go on and on and on and on, he does not really find focus for his story, let alone resolution. Three Levels of Time is, then, beautiful writing, with clarity and a certain succinctness, but without a point. Moreover, the thing is all too predictable, tainted by the mandatory leftwing sensationalism that is part of the baggage of all ecology books: population explosion, evil progress, bad capitalism, greed, hoggish consumption, no way out, the end is near, small is better, the ticking global timebomb, calamity, catastrophe. Concern is justified and necessary, of course, but such nonsense undercuts the author’s credibility. Perhaps the best things about the book are Hayes’s interviews with some representative scientists, a group which nowadays seems to aspire to the image of loons and cranks. Still, the book has something to say. if only the reader can muddle through. After all. life on earth is not exactly a dull subject.

JM

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Joe Mysak

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Three Levels of Time, by Harold Hayes (Dutton, 236 pp., $13.50). Harold Hayes, a former editor of Esquire and a gifted journalist, here grapples with the larger questions: Who am I? and, How did I get here? He also considers the “three levels of time” associated with the story: instinct, intelligence, and survival. This is a tall order, but Hayes takes the reader on a ramble filled with historical narrative, interviews with scientists, and the story of a man’s fight for life during the two weeks he is trapped in a wrecked station wagon at the bottom of a mountain ravine. The result is informative and multifarious, but not quite satisfying. Hayes admires John McPhee as a stylist, and that is part of the problem: while Hayes does not go on and on and on and on, he does not really find focus for his story, let alone resolution. Three Levels of Time is, then, beautiful writing, with clarity and a certain succinctness, but without a point. Moreover, the thing is all too predictable, tainted by the mandatory leftwing sensationalism that is part of the baggage of all ecology books: population explosion, evil progress, bad capitalism, greed, hoggish consumption, no way out, the end is near, small is better, the ticking global timebomb, calamity, catastrophe. Concern is justified and necessary, of course, but such nonsense undercuts the author’s credibility. Perhaps the best things about the book are Hayes’s interviews with some representative scientists, a group which nowadays seems to aspire to the image of loons and cranks. Still, the book has something to say. if only the reader can muddle through. After all. life on earth is not exactly a dull subject.