… was born on this date in 1899. He died a few weeks before his 62nd birthday in 1961.
Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
The New York Times has an extraordinary wealth of reviews, articles, interviews and other material collected on Hemingway.
NewMexiKen has completed David McCullough’s 1776, a military history of that fateful year newly out in paperback.
After an opening chapter detailing the politics in Britain, McCullough traces the action, from the successful American siege of Boston (forcing the British ultimately to abandon the city), through a series of dreadful and disastrous American defeats in New York, the demoralizing retreat across New Jersey and, at the end of December and beginning of January, the miraculous American victories at Trenton and Princeton. McCullough includes much from the contemporary correspondence and reminisces of the participants; the reader learns more about the war fighters than the fighting, but that is good.
The American army was hardly more than tattered remnants when it reached the Delaware River and crossed into Pennsylvania. As Thomas Paine so famously wrote that December of 1776:
Considering the circumstances — the depleted American ranks, the British naval and military superiority — it really is rather remarkable that Americans today are taking coffee breaks rather than stopping for tea and biscuits. The reason — in two words — George Washington, who learned from his (and other’s) mistakes, and, while often losing hope, never lost faith.
Philip Connors, the editor of the “New West Reader,” and a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, recommends some reading. He begins:
New Mexico is a world of almost blinding clarity and color. The vistas are vast. The hot peppers are eye-watering when fresh and bright blood-red if left to dry. Summer sunsets nearly make you want to weep. A person could write a good guide to New Mexico merely by compiling a list of Hatch green chile recipes and cataloging the state’s fire lookouts — one of which I’m lucky enough to occupy, and where on a clear day I can see a dozen mountain ranges, some in Mexico and Arizona. Yet it’s the spooky human history pulsing just beneath the surface that makes New Mexico such a fascinating place; any real reckoning with the literature of the state has to involve a reckoning with genocide and apocalypse. It would also, ideally, be undertaken by a bilingual reader. Long before English dominated the written stories of the region, Spanish reigned supreme. Indeed, the original masterpiece of American writing appeared before America even existed. It was composed as a report for the king of Spain by a remarkable explorer with a wonderful name, Cabeza de Vaca, or “head of a cow.”
Connors choices:
The Narrative of Cabeza De Vaca by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Last Cheater’s Waltz by Ellen Meloy
Songs of the Fluteplayer by Sherman Apt Russell
Any suggestions from NewMexiKen’s readers?
Novelist Owen Wister was born in Philadelphia on July 14, 1860. His 1902 novel The Virginian, helped create the myth of the American cowboy. Reared and educated on the east coast, Wister first visited the West in 1885. Set in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, The Virginian’s tender romance between a refined Eastern schoolteacher and a rough-and-tumble cowhand, with its climactic pistol gunfight, introduced themes now standard to the American Western.
It was now the Virginian’s turn to bet, or leave the game, and he did not speak at once.
Therefore Trampas spoke. “Your bet, you son-of-a–.”
The Virginian’s pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas: “When you call me that, SMILE.”
The Virginian sold 300,000 copies in its first year. Not bad for a western by a Philadelphia lawyer.
“Daniel Silva, another one of my favorites, will be there. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Joan Didion (!!!). Alice McDermott. All in one place! Whoa. I still have to pinch myself to realize I’m on the list with the likes of them. Deep down, I still feel like that dreamy girl with the HUGE PERM, sitting outside the bandroom at Del Norte High School, scribbling poems and songs into a spiral-bound notebook while a storm rolled in over the mountains. I truly feel like not a thing has changed. Weird, no?”
— Albuquerque’s very own Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez celebrating her invitation to the National Book Festival in Washington this September.
No, not weird at all.
An encyclopedia of book and publshing statistics compiled by Para Publishing.
I found this fascinating:
81% of the population feels they have a book inside them.
BUT
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
42% of college graduates never read another book.
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years. (Or this one: Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.)
The always delightful Dan Neil visits Prada. His essay, well worth your click, includes this:
Ah yes, the fashion world. The gist of Lauren Weisberger’s book—which I read while waiting at a red light last week—is that the world of high fashion is full of toxic egomaniacs and money-grubbing, drunk-with-power neurotics raving at their underlings with impossible demands, crushing their spirits and feeding like vampires on their idealistic ambition. No, wait, that’s the newspaper business. Anyway, the book is based on Weisberger’s adventures as the sniveling thrall to real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The book is a roman à clef—that’s French for “bitch fest”—in which Weisberger’s alter ego is named Andy Sachs and the infamous “Nuclear” Wintour is renamed Miranda Priestly.
Historian and author David McCullough is 73 today. His works include some of the best—and best-selling—biographies ever, Truman and John Adams, and the more recent miliary history 1776.
NewMexiKen thought this excerpt from an interview McCullough did with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole was interesting:
McCullough: There are certain books that I like very much. Reveille in Washington. I love Barbara Tuchman’s work, particularly The Proud Tower. Paul Horgan’s biography of Archbishop Lamy is a masterpiece. Wallace Stegner’s book on John Wesley Powell I’m fond of.
I like some of the present-day people: Robert Caro’s first volume on Lyndon Johnson was brilliant. I care for some of the best of the Civil War writing: Shelby Foote, for example, and Bruce Catton’s The Stillness at Appomattox. It was Catton’s Stillness at Appomattox that started me reading about the Civil War, and then on to people like Tuchman and others. There is a wonderful book called The Reason Why, about the Charge of the Light Brigade–and biographies–Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy, for example.
I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber. I’m very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down. To hold the reader’s attention, you have to bring the person who’s reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?
When I did Truman, I had no idea what woods I was venturing into. Had I known it was going to take me ten years, I never would have done it. In retrospect, I’m delighted now that I didn’t know.
I love all sides of the work but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. There have been times when a book was taking year after year—not with this one so much, but with The Path Between the Seas—when I’d come down to Washington to do research in the National Archives, hoping I wouldn’t find anything new because it could set me back another year or two.
By the same token, to open up a box of the death certificates kept by the French at the hospital in Ancon, at Panama City and to read the personal details of those who died—their names, their age, where they came from, height, color of eyes—was a connection with the reality of them, the mortal tale of that undertaking, that one can never find by doing the conventional kind of research with microfilm or Xeroxed copies.
McCullough also says this: “You stand in front of one of those great paintings or you pick up Samuel Johnson’s essays or Francis Parkman’s works on the French and Indian War, and it’s humbling. But it also is affirming in the sense that you realize that you’re working in a great tradition.”
Bruce Barcott begins his review of Cross Country by Robert Sullivan:
In the summer of 1981 my parents packed my sister and me into our 1973 Gran Torino station wagon and drove, on a route resembling a fishhook, from our home in Ventura, Calif., to Ensenada, Mexico, and then straight up the spine of I-5 to our grandparents’ house in Everett, Wash. Along the way, things happened. The Torino lacked air-conditioning, so we sucked motel ice cubes as we drove the length of California’s broiling Central Valley. My sister and I stared daggers at our father when he vetoed our plan to see the Trees of Mystery, a tourist trap near Crescent City. It was getting late, he said, and we had to make time. The next day the Torino’s transmission blew out near Grants Pass, Ore., and we “made time” sitting in a laundermat waiting for the parts to arrive. Agony in the doing and ecstasy in the telling, the trip has become a central part of our family lore. My sister and I can still crack each other up by muttering, “Trees of Mystery.”
Cross Country is subtitled: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily Post, … kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant.
“Cross Country” tells the story of one such trip: a simple west-to-east crossing that takes the Sullivans from his wife’s cousin’s wedding near Portland, Ore., to New York. Riding with the author in a rented Impala are his wife, his teenage son, his younger daughter and a rooftop luggage pack that threatens to disintegrate at highway speeds. Though technically a travel memoir, “Cross Country” aspires to be much more: a survey of cross-country road trips written with the languid pace and arcane detail that might characterize a six-day drive with a charming, talkative history buff.
Thanks to Veronica for the tip.
And click here for Jill’s take on our own family vacations.
… was born on this date in 1900. In January 2003 Outside Magazine listed its 25 essential books for the well-read explorer. At the top was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
Like his most famous creation, The Little Prince, that visitor from Asteroid B-612 who once saw 44 sunsets in a single day, Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky. Killed in World War II at age 44, “Saint Ex” was a pioneering pilot for Aéropostale in the 1920s, carrying mail over the deadly Sahara on the Toulouse-Dakar route, encountering cyclones, marauding Moors, and lonely nights: “So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men. Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited out the night.” Whatever his skills as a pilot—said to be extraordinary—as a writer he is effortlessly sublime. Wind, Sand and Stars is so humane, so poetic, you underline sentences: “It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.” Saint-Exupéry did just that. No writer before or since has distilled the sheer spirit of adventure so beautifully. True, in his excitement he can be righteous, almost irksome—like someone who’s just gotten religion. But that youthful excess is part of his charm. Philosophical yet gritty, sincere yet never earnest, utterly devoid of the postmodern cop-outs of cynicism, sarcasm, and spite, Saint-Exupéry’s prose is a lot like the bracing gusts of fresh air that greet him in his open cockpit. He shows us what it’s like to be subject—and king—of infinite space.
From Wannabe Hippie (with thanks to Veronica for the pointer), a collection of analogies and metaphors from high school English. Don’t miss it; some examples:
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
Joel Achenbach discusses that most special word. The essay includes this:
Liberating the word became a dubious triumph of the 1960s counterculture. At Woodstock, Country Joe and the Fish led a rousing cheer that began with “Give me an F!” and continued on through “K,” finally asking, “What’s that spell?” Now it sounds silly. Wow. They said a bad word out loud! What revolutionaries!
After reading the review last week of John McPhee’s latest book, Uncommon Carriers, and posting about it, I ordered it. The book arrived yesterday morning and I spent the afternoon reading it.
If you’ve ever been interested in trucks or trains, or river barges, or how UPS works, you will, I think, find this fascinating reading. And no one writes this kind of stuff better than John McPhee.
“The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled ‘Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.’ Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: ‘All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.’ ”
Dan Froomkin discussing Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine
From a review of John McPhee’s latest book, Uncommon Carriers:
This is also the theme that ties together “Uncommon Carriers,” almost all of which, like McPhee’s previous books, first appeared as New Yorker articles. Small boys dream of being the driver of a giant tractor trailer that towers over the family car, or of piloting a ship, or (most of all in my day) of being a railroad engineer. Three portraits of people at work in these professions are the core of this new collection, which includes several shorter pieces also related to transportation: one about a pond in France where sea captains pay $15,000 for a weeklong ship-handling course using scale models, one retracing Thoreau’s canoe journey on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and one about the innards of United Parcel Service.
Explore Shakespeare with Google
Amazon.com Grocery — Snacks, Cookies and Candy, Coffee and Tea, Natural & Organic, Baby Care, Household, Pet Supplies & more.
The Miami-Dade School Board voted to ban the children’s book A Visit to Cuba from the county’s public schools.
It became the target of controversy earlier this year when the father of a Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary student complained about the book’s rosy portrayal of life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
“The Cuban people have been paying a dear price for 47 years for the reality to be known,” said Juan Amador Rodriguez, a former political prisoner in Cuba who filed the original complaint, which was denied, and subsequent appeals. “A 32-page book cannot silence that.”
It’s heartwarming when people flee a dictatorship so they can come to America and start banning books.
James Wolcott lovingly reviews The Complete New Yorker.
After I finally broke down, sliced through the plastic, split open the accursed thing, and inserted the installation disk into the laptop, I found myself lured into a Borgesian labyrinth of interlocking chambers, spiral stairs, and odd detours that unearthed archeological finds wherever the links led. Daylight disappeared as I descended into permanent dusk, the thumbnail covers of The New Yorker instilling a nostalgia for a time I had never known.
From Reason, a “recent survey of men’s and women’s favorite books points to a more fundamental question—and a fascinating answer.” An excerpt:
When they got around to interviewing men on the same topic, the results were decidedly different. For starters, many male respondents took issue with the question itself, either refusing to name a text or picking a non-fiction work instead of a novel. “Many men we approached really did not seem to associate reading fiction with life choices,” wrote Jardine and Watkins. The men’s responses also didn’t vary as much as the women’s. The women they interviewed coughed up about 200 different titles, whereas the men’s picks congregated mostly around four works: Albert Camus’s The Stranger (traditionally translated into British English as The Outsider), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
“The men’s list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading,” Jardine cheekily told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life’s journey, as consolers or guides, as women do… They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals.”
… should have been 77 years old today.
Garrison Keillor has written an absolutely wonderful review of ‘Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,’ by Charles J. Shields.
This biography will not disappoint those who loved the novel and the feisty, independent, fiercely loyal Scout, in whom Harper Lee put so much of herself.
By all means read the review if you’ve ever read To Kill A Mockingbird, or, for that matter, In Cold Blood, or seen Capote. Then buy the biography.
Tuesday Evening, May 23. NewMexiKen is looking at an Oscar — and a Golden Globe. They’re sitting on the mantle above the fireplace at the Lonesome Dove Inn in Archer City, Texas. That’s novelist, essayist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City — the real town from The Last Picture Show.
The Oscar I’m looking at is McMurtry’s for co-writing the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain — with Diana Ossana, based on the story by E. Annie Proulx. McMurtry has left the award to the safekeeping of Mary Webb, operator of the Lonesome Dove Inn. It fits nicely with the theme of her Bed and Breakfast — the Terms of Endearment Room, the Cadillac Jack room, Hud’s Library, and so on, all named for McMurtry works. (Lonsome Dove was McMurtry’s Pulitizer Prize-winning novel.)
In addition to the Inn, Archer City features McMurtry’s bookstore Booked Up. Actually it features Booked Ups 1 through 4 with several hundred thousand used books, including many rare and collectible volumes. The stores occupy four separate buildings near the town square — Booked Up 1 was once the Ford dealer.
Archer City appears much as it did in the 1971 film The Last Picture Show. A town of about 1,800, there is still just the one stoplight. When NewMexiKen tried to wait this evening to let cars continue before I sauntered across at that, the only controlled intersection, I was encouraged by a driver to go ahead. And after crossing I was told to “Have a nice eve-nin.”
I was having a nice evening. It was a gorgeous, warm star-filled night, perfect for a walk in a storybook place.
… considered the first serious western, 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.
… of Peter Matthiessen (79) and Garry Wills (72). The Writer’s Almanac has a good essay on each today, or you can hear Garrison Keillor tell you about these two fine writers.
At The New York Review of Books, Jeff Madrick offers a lengthy review of Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.
In Kevin Phillips’s view, the Bush energy policy is a prime example of America’s failure to confront its most difficult challenges. Phillips, once a member of the Nixon administration, has written a timely book that argues that America is very different from the independent and omnipotent nation portrayed by President Bush and his administration. Dependency on oil is one of three major tendencies that will seriously undermine America’s future, he writes, the other two being the influence of radical religion and the growing reliance on debt to support the economy. For Phillips, these constitute “the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century,” and he offers little hope that the US will avoid the consequences. Since he wrote his widely read The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, Phillips has published several books lamenting how poorly the Republicans have handled their responsibilities. American Theocracy is his most pessimistic work to date.
In some ways Madrick thinks Phillips is a narrow optimist.
Phillips’s three major threats to the nation are well chosen, and he presents much information about them; but he could usefully have considered other perils to the US as well. The rising cost of health care, for example, is as grave a concern as the three issues on which he concentrates. Unless that system is radically reformed the US will face a future in which growing numbers of people will not receive adequate treatment. The cost of education is on a similar trajectory, as the chances of getting even a minimal education in the poorer neighborhoods become smaller. Similarly urgent are the failures of the economy. Despite rapid increases in productivity, which is historically the source of a rising standard of living, family incomes are not growing. In fact, after the five recent years of economic expansion, median family income is roughly what it was in 1999, even though wages at last rose early this year.
Madrick himself, however, proves more optimistic than Phillips about America’s ability to change and recover.
If you don’t have the time or inclination to read American Theocracy, but these issues interest you, Madrick’s review is very worthwhile.