Wilderness Tips, existential anxiety I nprovides the common medium for characters who are struggling with the steady erosion by time and experience of their youthful illusions and dreams. The perspective in many is overtly retrospective as middle-aged protagonists brood over where life has or has not repaid earlier hopes as the winds of entropy blow through their careers, their marriages, and the culture at large. Ecological catastrophe looms in a work like "The Age of Lead," which juxtaposes the discovery of a deadly new virus to the exhumation of a member of the ill-fated nineteenth-century Franklin Expedition to the Arctic. Modern science has decisively, albeit ironically, linked his death to lead poisoning caused by the soldering that had made tin canning "the ultimate defense against starvation and scurvy. . . .
