Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods by Jennifer Kabat. Milkweed Editions, 360 pp., $20.
On Shakespeare’s enchanted island, Prospero stands at the shoreline, staff raised toward the darkening sky. With arcane words and gestures, he summons the winds, sculpts towering clouds from empty air, and commands lightning to split the heavens. The seas churn and rise at his bidding, their blue-green waters transformed to white foam and shadow. “I have bedimmed the noontide sun,” he declares with supernatural pride, “called forth the mutinous wind / And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault / Set roaring war.” His manufactured tempest—precise in its fury, calculated in its destruction—serves both vengeance and restoration, shipwrecking his enemies without claiming a single life. When his ethereal servant Ariel reports back, voice lilting with satisfaction, “Not a hair perished. / On their sustaining garments not a blemish / But fresher than before,” we glimpse the ancient dream of perfect mastery over nature’s most violent expressions—catastrophe …
