Category: Books & Writers

Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. George Washington lost ninety percent of his army and was driven across the Delaware River. Panic and despair spread through the states.

Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, Washington–and many other Americans–refused to let the Revolution die. Even as the British and Germans spread their troops across New Jersey, the people of the colony began to rise against them. George Washington saw his opportunity and seized it. On Christmas night, as a howling nor’easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his men across the river and attacked the exhausted Hessian garrison at Trenton, killing or capturing nearly a thousand men. A second battle of Trenton followed within days. The Americans held off a counterattack by Lord Cornwallis’s best troops, then were almost trapped by the British force. Under cover of night, Washington’s men stole behind the enemy and struck them again, defeating a brigade at Princeton. The British were badly shaken. In twelve weeks of winter fighting, their army suffered severe damage, their hold on New Jersey was broken, and their strategy was ruined.

Fischer’s richly textured narrative reveals the crucial role of contingency in these events. We see how the campaign unfolded in a sequence of difficult choices by many actors, from generals to civilians, on both sides. While British and German forces remained rigid and hierarchical, Americans evolved an open and flexible system that was fundamental to their success. At the same time, they developed an American ethic of warfare that John Adams called “the policy of humanity,” and showed that moral victories could have powerful material effects. The startling success of Washington and his compatriots not only saved the faltering American Revolution, but helped to give it new meaning, in a pivotal moment for American history.

— From the book jacket of David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father–an ardent pacifist–and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision–not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames’s soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

— From the book jacket of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

FICTION
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

DRAMA
Doubt, a parable by John Patrick Shanley

HISTORY
Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press)

BIOGRAPHY
de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Alfred A. Knopf)

POETRY
Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press)

GENERAL NON-FICTION
Ghost Wars by Steve Coll (The Penguin Press)

MUSIC
Second Concerto for Orchestra by Steven Stucky (Theodore Presser Company)

One popular theory is that he comes from Planet Brainiac, where he was such a dunce he had to be exiled to Earth.

My own theory is that Steve has that very rare mental power known as the ability to concentrate. When I peppered him with questions last night about the secrets of his craft, he confessed to the ability to see the shape of a narrative. He said the structure of the book came to him one day while he was jogging — how each part of the book would begin and end, and how the narrative would culminate in the events of Sept. 10, 2001.

Some of us can’t even get our brains around an entire blog item.

— Joel Achenbach writing about collegue and Pulitzer winner Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars

NewMexiKen just read this excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller Blink and will be heading off to the bookstore now to purchase the book.

A profile of Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, from The New York Times:

Since its release on March 18, 2003, “The Da Vinci Code,” Mr. Brown’s fourth novel, has sold roughly 25 million copies in 44 languages around the world, including nearly 10 million hardcover copies in the North America. That is 10 times the average sales of industry titans like John Grisham and Nora Roberts, making the book one of the fastest-selling adult novels of all time. While most books move into paperback within a year of their original publication in hardcover, Mr. Brown’s publisher, Doubleday, still has not scheduled a paperback release of “The Da Vinci Code.” …

“In some ways, my life has changed dramatically,” Mr. Brown said, as when he arrived at the airport in Boston to catch the shuttle to La Guardia Airport – only to realize that he had left his driver’s license at his home in New Hampshire. “Fortunately, the guy behind me in line had a copy of ‘Da Vinci Code,’ ” he said. “I borrowed it, showed security the author photo and made my flight.”

In other ways, Mr. Brown said, life has not changed. “My writing process, for example, remains unchanged,” he said. “I still get up at 4 a.m. every morning and face a blank computer screen. My current characters really don’t care how many books I’ve sold, and they still require my same effort and cajoling to persuade them to do what I want.”

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

It’s the birthday of Pulitizer Prize-winning writer John McPhee. He’s 74. The Writer’s Almanac has an excellent profile of McPhee that includes this:

McPhee has published more than 25 books, even though he rarely writes more than 500 words a day. He once tried tying himself to a chair to force himself to write more, but it didn’t work. He said, “People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so prolific.’ God, it doesn’t feel like it—nothing like it. But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.”

was born on this date in 1806.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

NewMexiKen read Bob Dylan’s autobiographical Chronicles: Volume One Friday night and Saturday. Perhaps one has to be somewhat of a Dylan fan, and perhaps one has to have an interest in modern American music, but those are the only qualifiers I would put on this superb narrative. It is fast-paced, wonderfully written and vivid.

Some reviewers have questioned the books authenticity; that is, is Dylan telling what really happened or embellishing the myth.

Who cares?

was born on this date in 1952. She is co-author with her husband of children’s books including Lizards on the Wall and It Rained on the Desert Today.

NewMexiKen can remember vividly his introduction to Debby — when his baby sister came home from the hospital.

Many will recognize that the Doonesbury character Uncle Duke was based on the journalist Hunter Thompson who killed himself Sunday at age 67. One of Duke’s many roles was Ambassador to China during the 1970s.

NewMexiKen visited the American embassy in Beijing in 1992. As with many embassies, there was the portrait gallery of former ambassadors (not yet many in Beijing as diplomatic recognition had only been re-established in 1979). Among the portraits were those of Ambassador George H.W. Bush and Ambassador Leonard Woodcock.

And that of Ambassador Duke.

From a fine appreciation of Hunter Thompson by Henry Allen in The Washington Post:

“There’s no such thing as paranoia,” he said. “The truth is, your worst fears always come true.”

On the ’72 candidates:
Being around Edmund Muskie “was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat.” Nixon “speaks for the werewolf in us.” And Hubert Humphrey, the saint of long-ago liberalism: “There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you’ve followed him around for a while.”

“I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they’ve always worked for me.”

Joel Achenbach writes about Hunter Thompson, including this:

For all of Thompson’s theatrics and self-abuse, he could write like a demon. His prose accelerated across the page like a sportscar with the top down. He kept himself squarely in the picture, to great comic effect. We understood that he needed drugs the way other people needed oxygen, that he had an odd fondness for guns and violence, and that he loathed Richard Nixon and most authoritarian institutions. Otherwise, he wasn’t very complicated. He didn’t gum up his narrative with soul-searching. He really served as a big eyeball, if perhaps a rather glazed one.

One of America’s great writers, the Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1993, Toni Morrison is 74 today.

In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.

NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists previously, but repeats them here — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born on this date in 1909.

First in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.

TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett

TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis

From a review of God’s Politics in The Washington Post:

The problem with religious conservatives is not that they invoke religion too much, but that they practice “bad theology,” he argues. He notes that although religious conservatives focus on homosexuality and abstinence, Jesus and Isaiah and Micah had much more to say about poverty and economic justice than sexual impropriety. Therefore, he writes, the Bush administration’s tax policies reflect a “religious failure.” And also: “An enormous public misrepresentation of Christianity has taken place. . . . [M]any people around the world now think Christian faith stands for political commitments that are almost the opposite of its true meaning. How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American?”

From Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times:

These are the Disney characters of James B. Stewart’s two-decade history of corporate squabbling, “DisneyWar.” The only traditional Disney figure they bring to mind is Pinocchio. The book describes an Eisner-dominated atmosphere of nonstop conflict and bickering, punctuated by the occasional stinker (“Pearl Harbor”), gold mine (“The Lion King”) or missed opportunity (“The Sopranos”). It tells a messy, fractious story complete with its own Seven Dwarfs: Sneaky, Screamy, Pushy, Greedy, Grabby, Nasty and Snarky. Snow White is nowhere to be seen.

A year ago I posted this:

NewMexiKen sat down with Grisham’s The Last Juror just before 3; got up to stretch, etc., for a 20-30 minutes at 6; finished it about 8:20. I’d say that’s a novel with a pretty good hook.

A year later I have absolutely no recollection of what this book was about. In fact, I saw someone reading it recently and wondered whether I had read it.

Apprehensible: Capable of being understood.

Reprehensible: Deserving rebuke or censure; blameworthy.

was born on this date in 1923.

Mailer has not only published 39 books (including 11 novels), he has written plays (and staged them), screenplays (and directed and acted in them), poems (in The New Yorker and underground journals), and attempted every sort of narrative form, including some he invented. No record of “new journalism” is complete without mention of his 1960s Esquire columns, essays and political reportage. He has reported on six sets of political conventions (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, 1996), participated in scores of symposia, appeared and debated hundreds of times on college campuses, boxed (and fought) in several venues and led a vigorous public life in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, his current home. His passions, feuds, imbroglios, litigations and loyalities are numerous, notorious and complex. Happily married for nearly a quarter of a century to Norris Church, he was wed five times previously and has nine children all told. A stalwart on radio and television talk shows, he may have been interviewed more times than any writer who has ever lived. Without being paid for his pains, he has given advice to several presidents, has run for office himself (mayor of New York), served as president of the American chapter of the writers organization, P.E.N., and won most of the major literary awards, but for the Nobel. Co-founder of The Village Voice, he also named it, and has been the equivalent of a decathalon athlete in the effort to break down barriers between popular, elite and underground publications. He has written for at least 75 different magazines and journals.

J. Michael Lennon, Professor of English, Wilkes University [for PBS, American Masters]

was born on this date in 1915.

Thomas Merton, known in the monastery as Fr. Louis, was born on 31 January 1915 in Prades, southern France. The young Merton attended schools in France, England, and the United States. At Columbia University in New York City, he came under the influence of some remarkable teachers of literature, including Mark Van Doren, Daniel C. Walsh, and Joseph Wood Krutch. Merton entered the Catholic Church in 1938 in the wake of a rather dramatic conversion experience. Shortly afterward, he completed his masters thesis, “On Nature and Art in William Blake.”

Following some teaching at Columbia University Extension and at St. Bonaventure’s College, Olean, New York, Merton entered the monastic community of the Abbey of Gethsemani at Trappist, Kentucky, on 10 December 1941. He was received by Abbot Frederic Dunne who encouraged the young Frater Louis to translate works from the Cistercian tradition and to write historical biographies to make the Order better known.

The abbot also urged the young monk to write his autobiography, which was published under the title The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) and became a best-seller and a classic. During the next 20 years, Merton wrote prolifically on a vast range of topics, including the contemplative life, prayer, and religious biographies. His writings would later take up controversial issues (e.g., social problems and Christian responsibility: race relations, violence, nuclear war, and economic injustice) and a developing ecumenical concern. He was one of the first Catholics to commend the great religions of the East to Roman Catholic Christians in the West.

Merton died by accidental electrocution in Bangkok, Thailand, while attending a meeting of religious leaders on 10 December 1968, just 27 years to the day after his entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Many esteem Thomas Merton as a spiritual master, a brilliant writer, and a man who embodied the quest for God and for human solidarity. Since his death, many volumes by him have been published, including five volumes of his letters and seven of his personal journals. According to present count, more than 60 titles of Merton’s writings are in print in English, not including the numerous doctoral dissertations and books about the man, his life, and his writings.

Brother Patrick Hart, OCSO [Abbey of Gethsemani]

was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on this date in 1872.

Zane Grey was the first American millionaire author. According to the Zane Grey’s West Society web site:

The breakthrough success of Heritage of the Desert in 1910 enabled Zane Grey to establish a home in Altadena, California, and a hunting lodge on the Mogollon Rim near Payson, Arizona; and the family of five moved West for good. A lifelong passion for angling and the rich rewards of his writing also allowed Grey to roam the world’s premier game-fishing grounds in his own schooner and reel in several deep-sea angling records which stood for decades. A prodigiously prolific writer, Grey would spend several months each year gathering experiences and adventures, whether on “safari” in the wilds of Colorado or fishing off Tahiti, and then spend the rest of the year weaving them all into tales for serialization, magazine articles, or the annual novel.

Zane Grey wrote to live and lived to write — surely a balance rarely attained — until his untimely death of heart failure on October 23, 1939. He left us almost 90 books in print, of which about 60 are Westerns, 9 concern fishing, and 3 trace the fate of the Ohio Zanes, the rest being short story collections, a biography of the young George Washington, juvenile fiction and baseball stories.

Everyone should read the classic Riders of the Purple Sage.

was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on this date in 1927. The Writer’s Almanac has this:

In 1956 he began working as a park ranger and a fire lookout for the National Park Service. He worked there for fifteen years, and this led him to write about the wilderness of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. He said, “For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!” His book Desert Solitaire (1968) is about his time working as a ranger in Arches National Park, Utah. In it he argues for, among other things, a ban on cars in wilderness preserves. In a memorial piece about Abbey, Edward Hoagland says of him, “Personally, he was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly and cowboy qualities, and even when silent he appeared bigger than life.”

NewMexiKen gathered these Abbey quotations:

If you’re never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You’ve only missed out on one half of life.

The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Edward Abbey died in 1989.