Category: Books & Writers

The call of the I don’t know what I want to do

The Writer’s Almanac has a great essay on Jack London, born in San Francisco on this date in 1876. You really should go read it all, but here is the final paragraph:

When he returned to California, he finally had some stories to write. His first big success was his novel The Call of the Wild (1903), about a dog named Buck who goes from living as a domestic pet to living on its own in the wilderness of Alaska. His most famous short story is “To Build a Fire” (1908), about a man struggling and failing to light a single fire in the snowy wilderness. It is one of the most widely anthologized and translated stories ever written by an American author.

The Gift of the Magi

By O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), 1906.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And
sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two
at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and
the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.
Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven
cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

Continue reading The Gift of the Magi

A Christmas Carol

… was first published on this date in 1843.

Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

If Barack Obama is as good a politician as he is a writer, he will soon be President

Anyway, all of this is just a long prelude to the fact that I picked up his book The Audacity of Hope and was blown away at how well written it is. His stories sometimes make me laugh out loud and at other times well up with tears. I find myself underlining the book repeatedly so I can find the best parts quickly again in the future. I am also almost certain he wrote the whole thing himself, based on people I know who know him. I have no interest in politics, yet I am devouring this book. If you aren’t giving Freakonomics as a Christmas gift this year—probably you gave it to everyone on your list last Christmas 🙂 —this would make a great gift.

I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised at what a good writer he is because I read his first book Dreams from My Father two years ago and loved that one as well. But unlike that first book, written 15-20 years ago before he had political ambitions, I thought this new one would just be garbage. Rarely does a book so exceed my expectations. Also, I should stress that I don’t agree with all his political views, but that in no way detracts from the enjoyment of reading the book.

If he has the same effect on others as he does on me, you are looking at a future president.

Steven D. Levitt

As far as NewMexiKen is concerned, Gates, Obama, whoever, I’m voting for Jeb Bush.

Best line of the day, so far

He’s good-looking, though, like he just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public-service advertisement. He’s got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little moons orbiting them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put Junior and me next to each other, he’s the Before Columbus Arrived Indian and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian.

Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” The New Yorker, 2003, an absolutely first-rate short story.

Pippi’s mom

It’s the birthday of the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren … born Astrid Ericsson on a farm near Vimmerby, Sweden (1907). She’s the creator of Pippi Longstocking, a nine-year-old girl with no parents who lives in a red house at the edge of a Swedish village with her horse and her pet monkey, Mr. Nilsson. She has red pigtails, and she wears one black stocking and one brown, with black shoes twice as long as her feet. She eats whole chocolate cakes and sleeps with her feet on the pillow, and she’s the strongest girl in the world.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

November 8th is the birthday

… of Patti Page. A good gift for Patti as she turns 79 might be A Doggy in The Window. Depends on how much, I suppose.

… of Morley Safer. He’s 75.

… of Bonnie Raitt. She turns 57 in the Nick of Time.

It’s also the birthday of Margaret Mitchell, born on this date in 1900. As you all must know (but just in case), Mitchell’s original name for Scarlett O’Hara was Pansy O’Hara. Just wouldn’t have been the same.

The Blind Side

NewMexiKen spent much of the day reading Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side. While I often recommend books, I hate to rave about them because I realize we have different interests, tastes and sensibilities. But if you have any interest whatsoever in NFL or college football or American socio-economic conditions, I urge you to get this wonderful work of nonfiction literature. Perhaps it even surpasses a need for those interests.

The Blind Side is the story of Michael Oher, a black virtually abandoned child from the worst slums of Memphis who gets admitted to a Christian prep school, adopted by a wealthy white family, and ends up at Ole Miss (where he’s currently in his second season.) Along the way, Lewis tells how the left offensive tackle became the second most valued position in pro football — because the left tackle protects the blind side of a right-handed quarterback.

We went to dinner again, but this time my wife, Tabitha, came along. When we got around to the subject of Michael Oher it took Sean [Oher’s guardian] about ten minutes to get her laughing, twenty to get her crying, and thirty to ruin the meal. But it was worth it, because in the car on the way home she said, “I don’t understand why you are writing about anything else.”

Three amusing, yet insightful passages:

“Where are his parents?” asked [prep school football coach Hugh] Freeze. He felt a twinge of interest. If a man who weighed 400 pounds was referring to someone else as “Big Mike” he’d like to see the size of that someone else.

She didn’t know a lot of gay people. White Evangelical Christian Memphis—which is to say most of East Memphis—wasn’t really designed to make black people feel comfortable in it, but if you had a choice of being black in East Memphis, or being gay in East Memphis, you’d think at least twice about it.

Of course, football players weren’t the only Ole Miss students majoring in Criminal Justice. But when the Criminal Justice program took the field trip to Parchman Farm—aka the Mississippi State Penitentiary—the football players were the only students with friends on the inside.

A fascinating, informative and moving story.

Blood and Thunder

Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday has written a review of Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. Momaday’s summary paragraph:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

NewMexiKen began reading the book the other day and, so far, it’s been very good — excellent reading. For whatever reasons, Sides jumps around in the chronology but, while unusual for a narrative history, it seems to work. It has the effect of seeming to move the story along more rapidly.

I’d noted three passages I found particularly amusing, informative, or resonant:

[S]tories like the one about the mountain valley in Wyoming that was so big it took an echo eight hours to return, so that a man bedding down for the night could confidently shout “Git up!” and know that he would rise in the morning to his own wake-up call.

As a baby in his cradleboard, Narbona [a Navajo leader] probably was not called anything at all, for Navajos, who tended to view early infanthood as an extension of gestation, did not usually give names to their children until specific personal characteristics began to show themselves—Hairy Face, Slim Girl, No Neck, Little Man Won’t Do As He’s Told. Although Navajo parents followed few hard rules about how to name their children, it was generally agreed that the watershed moment when a baby could definitively be said to have passed from infanthood into something more fully human was the child’s “first spontaneous laugh.” First laughter was an occasion for much celebration, and it was the time when many Navajos held naming ceremonies for their young; it is likely that this is when Narbona received his original “war name,” whatever it might have been.

Perhaps to dignify the nakedness of Polk’s land lust, the American citizenry had got itself whipped into an idealistic frenzy, believing with an almost religious assurance that its republican form of government and its constitutional freedoms should extend to the benighted reaches of the continent held by Mexico, which, with its feudal customs and Popish superstitions, stood squarely in the way of progress. To conquer Mexico, in other words, would be to do it a favor.

It’s Trying to Be a Rainy Day

It’s a cool, almost dreary day here by the Sandia Mountains; a good day to curl up with a book. And so I shall, with Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, a new history of the conquest of the American southwest and California.

Reviews for Blood and Thunder have been positive, most finding the storytelling compelling. In the Times, William Grimes wrote it’s a “rousing, full-throated rendition of an old story, the making of the American West.”

I’ll let you know. [See here.]

Three for Saturday

Last week’s New Yorker was particularly good and these stood out.

Surgeon Atul Gawande surveys recent developments in childbirth — as he describes it “How childbirth went industrial.”

Historian Jill Lepore reviews Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, a new history of the conquest of the American southwest and California.

Mark Singer has a profile of murderer and escapee Richard McNair. The article is not available, but here’s a video of the suspect confronted by a police officer the day of his last escape. Priceless.

Winner of the Booker Prize

Although it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals, Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980’s, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.

The above paragraph begins the review published last February in The New York Times Book Review for The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.

The novel by the 35-year-old Desai was named the Booker Prize winner this evening. She is the award’s youngest winner ever.

Blitz? I Don’t Think So! You Blitz.

Discussing The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, Jason Kottke suggests a fascinating idea:

Many of the left tackles that Lewis talks about in the book can run faster than most quarterbacks, they can throw the ball just as far or farther (as a high school sophomore, Michael Oher could stand at the fifty-yard line and toss footballs through the goalposts), possess great athletic touch and finesse, have the intellect to run an offense, move better than most QBs, know the offense and defense as well as the QB, are taller than the average QB (and therefore has better field vision over the line), and presumably, at 320-360 pounds, are harder to tackle and intimidate than a normal QB. Sounds like a good idea to me.

America Unabridged

At Jill and Byron’s, NewMexiKen was poking around the magazines and found the December 2004 issue of American Heritage with its outstanding bibliography of American history. This list is worth saving.

So here it is, certainly the most challenging editorial task we’ve ever attempted—and one of the most rewarding. We have drawn on the knowledge and enthusiasm of leading historians, writers, and critics to offer a compendium of the very best books about the American experience. Divided into both chronological and subject categories ranging from the rise of the Republic to sports, from the years of World War II to the African-American journey, each section presents the writer’s choice of the 10 best books in a particular field, along with lucid, lively explanations of what makes them great. The result, we believe, is both a valuable reference work and an anthology of highly personal views of the making of our country and our culture that is immensely readable in its own right.

— American Heritage: America Unabridged.