Category: Books & Writers

Alex Haley

… was born 90 years ago today. Haley was the author of two publishing phenomena — The Autobiography of Malcolm X (6 million copies) and Roots, which was not only a best-seller, but led to one of the most successful television series ever. Nearly half the people in the country watched the last episode in January 1977. Haley won a special Pulitzer for Roots, “the story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.”

Subsequently it bothered me to learn he plagarized sections of the book and possibly fudged some of the genealogy. Clearly, that wasn’t right. Even so, the good his work did in educating both black and white America (and I include both books) was a legacy of major proportion.

I sat on the stage behind Haley once in 1979 as he spoke. He was a very self-possessed and self-assured speaker, confident yet pleasant and informal. He spoke for some time without notes, telling the story about the story — that is, how he learned about his family. As he spoke I could see the rapture on the faces of his listeners. To an audience of genealogists this was the Sermon on the Mount.

Haley, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard 1939-1959, before becoming a full-time writer, died of a heart attack in 1992. The Coast Guard has named a cutter for him.

Aldous Huxley

… was born on this date in 1894. This is from The Writer’s Almanac in 2007:

The result was Brave New World (1932), about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families; people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called “soma.”

Brave New World was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality. When George Orwell’s 1984 came out a few years later, many critics compared the two novels, trying to decide which one was more likely to come true. Huxley argued that his imagined future was more likely, because it would be easier to control people by keeping them happy than it would be by threatening them with violence.

The Country for This Old Man

Cormac McCarthy is 78 today.

From the Cormac McCarthy web site:

Critics have compared Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish yet beautifully written adventure masterpiece, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, with the best works of Dante, Poe, De Sade, Melville, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and William Styron. The critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the Twentieth Century, and perhaps the greatest by a living American writer. Critics cite its magnificent language, its uncompromising representation of a crucial period of American history, and its unapologetic, bleak vision of the inevitability of suffering and violence.

Six epic tales of tragedy and survival on the open seas

Forget what you’d take to a desert island—what would you do if you were stranded at sea? Say, on a fiberglass boat with some fishermen you hardly knew? Or clinging to a dinghy with a pair of drinking buddies? Floating in the open water with your autistic son? The short answer: anything you can think of, including the unthinkable. Here are six stories about people lost at sea who did everything they could to be found.

Longform.org’s guide to castaways

Maybe she is a wizard

In September of 2006, following a desperately sad childhood that saw both drug-addicted parents murdered and the care of her younger siblings left in her hands, 16-year-old Sacia Flowers decided to write to J. K. Rowling. In her heartfelt letter…she spoke of her love for the Harry Potter series and the empathy she felt for Harry given their upbringings; mentioned the bullying she experienced throughout school and her inability to make friends due to her insecurities; and then thanked the author for “lending me your hero and his world” during such a tough time, adding, “He is my hero, and you are my heroine.”

Below is Rowling’s encouraging repsonse.

Letters of Note: I will treasure your letter

There is a link to Sacia’s letter as well.

‘My name is Nick. This is my friend. His name is Jay. Jay has a big house. See his house.’

Roger Ebert goes on a wonderful rant — which I completely share — about a dumbed-down edition of The Great Gatsby. You need to read Ebert’s whole post, but here’s the essence.

The first is: There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he choose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.

Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities

Yesterday Amazon released a list of American cities of over 100,000 people buying the most books per capita. Cambridge, Massachusetts, topped the list. Click the link to see the other 19. Amazon also included this:

  • Not only do they like to read, but they like to know the facts: Cambridge, Mass.–home to the prestigious Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology–also topped the list of cities that ordered the most nonfiction books.
  • Boulder, Colo., lives up to its reputation as a healthy city by topping the list of cities that order the most books in the Cooking, Food & Wine category.
  • Alexandria, Va., residents must be reading a lot of bedtime stories – they topped the list of the city that orders the most children’s books.
  • Summer reading weather all year long? Florida was the state with the most cities in the Top 20, with Miami, Gainesville and Orlando making the list.

Best line of the day, but it’s early

“The homepage on my web browser is Yahoo, which I’m told it shouldn’t be, but I’ve just been too lazy to change it. From time to time I’ll read some of the comments under stories on it to get a sense of what it must be like at a Klan meeting.”

Aaron Sorkin in The Atlantic series “What I Read.” He reads the New York and Los Angeles Times.

Sorkin also has some interesting thoughts on the difference between the Wall Street Journal — where reporters “have cleared a very high bar to get the jobs they have” — and, say, BobsThoughts.com. “Bob could be the most qualified guy in the world but I have no way of knowing that because all he had to do to get his job was set up a website–something my 10-year-old daughter has been doing for 3 years.”

Logical punctuation

“For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post—almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.”

Should we start placing commas outside quotation marks? Read what Ben Yagoda has to say at Slate Magazine.

Why didn’t I think of that?

NewMexiKen’s grand nephew, The Bandit, is six today. He is quite insightful beyond his years however, as this conversation with his mother about the Tooth Fairy shows — Why didn’t I think of that? | The Quill Sisters.

Joe Posnanski has a “little essay on getting old” that any adult who is older today than they were yesterday should read — Joe Blogs: The Captain and Denial. It has a sports framework but tells universal truths and Joe is always good.

I know personally that I still feel like 35, but my body can’t keep up.

The Atlantic Wire has been running a feature “asking various people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets.” Today it is Jennifer Egan, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan: What I Read – The Atlantic Wire.

For more Media Diets: Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Glassner, Joe Weisenthal, Andrea Mitchell, Anna Holmes, Eric Schmidt, Nick Denton, David Brooks, Andrew Breitbart, Gary Shteyngart, Tom McGeveran, Megan McCarthy, Bret Stephens, Joseph Epstein, Dave Weigel, Christopher Hayes, Chris Anderson, Lewis Lapham, Reihan Salam, Peggy Noonan, Joe Randazzo, Jay Rosen, Neetzan Zimmerman, Clay Shirky, and many more here.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning,–if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,–how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those few brief hours, with the darling at your bosom,–the little sleepy head on your shoulder,–the small, soft arms trustingly holding on to your neck?

So wrote Harriet Beech Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, describing the scene as Eliza runs with her son, Harry. Reading this classic has somehow escaped me all these years, but I am enjoying it now, and can see — in the early going — why Lincoln reportedly said on meeting Mrs. Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

The book came out in 1852; proportionate to the population, it is one of the most popular novels ever.

And it’s fun and interesting to read.

Pulitzer Winners in Letters, Drama, and Music

Fiction
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Alfred A.. Knopf)

Drama
Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris

History
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner (W.W. Norton & Company)

Biography or Autobiography
Washington : A Life by Ron Chernow (The Penguin Press)

Poetry
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan (Grove/Atlantic)

General Nonfiction
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)

Music
Madame White Snake by Zhou Long (Oxford University Press)

Samantha Henig has a brief rundown of the journalism awards and some links at the News Desk : The New Yorker

Jill Lepore reviewed Ron Chernow’s “Washington: A Life” and Hendrik Hertzberg gave it a rave: George Washington, Ron Chernow, and ‘Small Government’ .

Teaching to the Text Message

An interesting perspective. It begins:

I’ve been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.

I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation. . . .