Category: Books & Writers

Nous Sommes Tous Sauvages

The best book about Custer is Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn.

“Son of the Morning Star makes good reading—its prose is elegant, its tone the voice of dry wit, its meandering narrative skillfully crafted. Mr. Connell is above all a storyteller, and the story he tells is vastly more complicated than who did what to whom on June 25, 1876.” Page Stegner

This book is generally considered one of the half-dozen best written about the American west. (And I intend to go read it again when I finish this.)

The best book attempting to tell the vastly more important Indian side of the story is James Welch’s Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians.

David Sedaris

NewMexiKen and Donna attended a David Sedaris reading this evening at an Albuquerque Barnes & Noble. He’s on a book tour promoting his sixth and most recent collection, published this month, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. If Sedaris’s reading was any indication, the book will be as amusing as his previous collections including Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Sedaris, a diminutive man himself, said that all adult men 5-6 and under could skip the line and go directly to the book signing table. Sure enough, there were several. The author said he once had made that offer for smokers, figuring their time was shorter than non-smokers.

Sedaris’s work appears frequently in The New Yorker and on NPR.

Best line of the day, so far

“Of course, the boys have already been reading other books, but the truth is Calvin and Hobbes is the standard to which all other great literature is held.”

Testosterhome on her sons’ summer reading. She goes on to note that the boys will be required to report on their summer books — “I’m sure there will be ice cream or weapons involved in this equation as well.”

Mexican Hat

NewMexiKen read the second of Michael McGarrity’s Kevin Kerney mysteries this afternoon and evening, Mexican Hat. I thought this was considerably better than the first, and I had liked it well enough.

The fact that I read Mexican Hat pretty much without putting it down is all you really need to know by way of a recommendation. This time the tough but lovable former Santa Fe cop solves a smuggling-murder crime wave in the Gila Mountains of western New Mexico.

Omnivore’s Dilemma

NewMexiKen has finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and highly recommends it to anyone interested in food. It was one of The New York Times 10 best books of the year in 2006.

This isn’t a cook book or a health book. It’s well-done journalism, reporting facts, history and trends, while profiling various people and places. The omnivore’s dilemma is that because humans can eat almost anything, we are easily confused (and manipulated). Pollan thinks we need to be better educated about the source of our foods so that we can make more informed choices. He sets out to increase his (and the reader’s) awareness about what we eat and where it comes from. He does so without grossing you out or trying to convert you (well, maybe a little). Pollan is not a vegetarian or animal rights absolutist.

[Pollan] embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald’s repast consumed by Pollan with his wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a “Big Organic” meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a “hunter-gatherer” feast consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or foraged himself.

The New York Times Book Review.

Here’s a lengthy adaptation from the final (but perhaps least interesting) section of the book — The Modern Hunter-Gatherer.

The Virginian

Considered the first serious western, The Virginian was published on this date in 1902. The novel by Owen Wister sold 300,000 copies in its first year. The University of Wyoming (the novel is set in Wyoming) has an online exhibit concerning The Virginian. According to the site:

Since its 1902 publication, The Virginian has left a lasting impact upon the American cultural landscape. In earlier years after its publication, The Virginian did much to popularize the American West. As a result, a romanticized view of the West became an integral part of the American popular imagination and cultural identity. In recent years, The Virginian has come under scrutiny. Wister’s portrayal of the West is seen by many as a myth at odds with reality.

When the San Francisco Chronicle listed the 100 best Western works of fiction in 1999, Wister’s novel was 46th.

May 27th ought to be a holiday

Best-selling mystery author Tony Hillerman was born on this date in 1925.  The Shape Shifter is the 18th book in the series centered on Navajo Tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.  Hillerman had an interesting website with excerpts from all the books, but it has disappeared.  There he told us that:

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green ‘crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers–my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t. 
. . . 

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of PEOPLE OF DARKNESS make sense–and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever’s “Days of Old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in universe of consumerism.

Mystery writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on this date in 1894.  Hammett departed from the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels (Sherlock Holmes for example) and transformed the genre with his less-than-glamorous realism.  He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.  

Hammett actually was a detective with Pinkerton for a few years just before World War I. Contracting TB during military service, he realized his health would keep him from resuming as a detective.  He turned to writing.  He published his first story in 1922, and then about 80 more, many in the popular pulp crime magazine Black Mask. Hammett’s first novel was Red Harvest, published in 1929.  His most famous character, Sam Spade, made his appearance in Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930). (It was the third—and only successful—attempt to turn that novel into a film when Humphrey Bogart played the role in 1941.) The Thin Man (1934) was the last of Hammett’s novels. 

By the early-thirties, Hammett was established and famous.  He began a relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman that lasted for 30 years despite his drinking and womanizing.  Though both eventually divorced their spouses, they never married. Hammett served in the Army in World War II, enlisting as a private at age 48.  His involvement in left-wing politics and unwillingness to testify about it before Congress however, and the continued drinking, diminished his stature.  Hammett died in 1961.

John Cheever was born on this date in 1912.

He wrote for more than 50 years and published more than 200 short stories. He’s known for writing about the world of American suburbia. Even though he was one of the most popular short-story writers of the 20th century, he once said that he only earned “enough money to feed the family and buy a new suit every other year.”

In 1935 he was published in The New Yorker for the first time, and he would continue to write for the magazine for the rest of his life. His stories were collected in books including The Way Some People Live (1943) and The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the few collections of short stories ever to make the New York Times best-seller list.

The Writer’s Almanac

Cheever died in 1982.

Been readin’ me some novels

 

NewMexiKen read both of the above these past few days. Both are from series, Blood of Victory (2002), from Furst’s succession of World War II espionage books, and Tularosa (1996), the first of McGarrity’s Kevin Kerney mysteries. It’s the third of Furst’s books I’ve read; the first of McGarrity’s.

Furst’s books describe the kind of world we know from the back story of Casablanca — individuals in small groups, possibly with some sort of “official” sanction or support, doing what they can to thwart the Nazis from one end of Europe to the other. They ride trains, have love affairs, smoke cigarettes, and blow up stuff. All in black in white, too.

McGarrity’s Kerney is the detective novel’s typical ex-cop, wounded in duty, loner, but respected. In Kerney’s case he’s an ex-Santa Fe cop, raised in the Tularosa basin (site of today’s missile range). He drives a pickup, rides horses, wins fights, loses fights, saves the girl, gets the bad guys. Good reading, if somewhat predictable. I expect to try another in the series soon. And another.

Book Report

I fear somewhere in the back of my mind I may have turned reading Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story into an assignment more than just acting on a recommendation. In any case, I found the book interesting and amusing but — honestly — he writes about a lot of music and a lot of bands I’ve barely just heard of — and certainly not listened to. While I try to keep up with current music, the music that absorbs my interest ended somewhere around 1965 or 66. Klosterman was born in 1972.

I found his obsessing about the women in his life (while on a cross country roadtrip) more interesting than his obsessing about the music; narcissistic, but interesting.

Klosterman does have a clever style though and at least three great lines:

“By now, the sky is as dark as Johnny Cash’s closet.”

“At this show, there aren’t many people with a job that includes air-conditioning.”

“Tina was always a case of good news/bad news (for instance, she was a part-time swimsuit model . . . but only for Target).”

What did I miss?

Obama’s Story, Written by Obama

Some interesting background on Obama the author from The New York Times. The article includes this:

The books have defined Mr. Obama’s public image in a way that few books by politicians have done. Reporters paw through them for insights into Mr. Obama the candidate, supplied by Mr. Obama the author. Out of his story, he has also drawn the central promise of his campaign: if a biracial son of a Kenyan and a Kansan could reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable in himself, a divided country could do the same.

His memoir is, as one publisher put it, “the single most vetted book in American politics right now.” Written at a time when Mr. Obama says he was thinking less about a career in politics than about simply writing a good book, it leaves an impression of candidness and authenticity that gives it much of its power.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Easy Reader

NewMexiKen finished Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World. As always, his descriptions and conversations with people he meets along the way are fascinating. The history is revealing if you aren’t terribly familiar with what was going on in America before the Pilgrims.

Horwitz has a brief video about the book at Amazon.com.

I’ll be turning my attention to Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story later today. It was the one book of his that the library had on the shelf.

Shakespeare

NewMexiKen read Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) last evening. The 199-page biography is well-paced, occasionally witty — though less so than Bryson’s usual work — and informative. He sticks pretty much to the life and times — and how little we actually know and can know about the Bard. There are quotations from the plays and sonnets, of course, but this is a biography, not comparative literature.

I liked it.

Killer Angels

Yesterday Professor ari at The Edge of the American West wrote about The Killer Angels in the classroom. He began:

On this day in 1975, Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, which, I’m told, is a good get. Killer Angels, for those of you who haven’t read it, tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, mostly through the eyes of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and James “Pete” Longstreet and Union officers Joshua Chamberlain and John Buford. The prose is vivid, the narrative taut, and Shaara’s command of tactics and history are both impressive.

If you’ve read the book or studied the civil war you may find ari’s post particularly interesting.

If you haven’t read the book, you really should. NewMexiKen was recently given a first edition. 🙂