Category: Books & Writers

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

… was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac in 2003:

He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

And, as noted in The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer, where Cherry-Garrard’s tale is listed second:

Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”

The Gift of the Magi

This is a Christmas season perennial here at NewMexiKen. Go ahead, read it again. It makes everything about the season seem simpler yet more precious.

Merry Christmas!

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

Knucklehead

I’ve told Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen and the mother of three boys, that I intend to get the book Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka by Jon Scieszka so I can read it aloud to her boys my next visit.

From the review:

Scieszka gets children, and he gets their humor. Especially boy humor. He tells the truth about what really goes on when parents aren’t looking. (Chapter 34, “Fire”: “There is something about boys and fire that is like fish and water, birds and air, cats and hairballs. They just go together.” Good thing Scieszka’s mom was a nurse.

The book’s design is also inviting. There are 38 chapters of two to three pages each, with titles like “Who Did It?” With the timing of a stand-up comedian, Scieszka writes in “Watch Your Brothers”: “That’s what my mom used to tell me and Jim — ‘Watch your brothers.’ So we did. We watched Jeff roll off the couch. We watched Brian dig in the plants and eat the dirt. We watched Gregg lift up the lid on the toilet and splash around in the water.”

As someone who grew up with three brothers, I am familiar with boy knuckleheadedness. Scieszka makes the case for certain truths of boyhood, like why nothing beats a good game of “slaughter ball.” “One guy would throw the football up in the air. The rest of us would try to catch it. Then once you caught it, you had to run around and try not to get ‘slaughtered’ by everyone else. It was a great game because you got to smash into a lot of people and then end up in a giant pile.” Did you know it takes only seven pounds of pressure to break a collarbone?

A Christmas Carol

… was published 165 years ago today.

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.

Outliers

“It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude ….”

Gladwell discusses Outliers, his latest best-seller. Two excerpts:

3. In what way are our explanations of success “crude?”

That’s a bit of a puzzle because we certainly don’t lack for interest in the subject. If you go to the bookstore, you can find a hundred success manuals, or biographies of famous people, or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great achievement. (Or is it seven?) So we should be pretty sophisticated on the topic. What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we’ve been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that’s the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looked at the forest.

5. Doesn’t that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual’s control?

I don’t mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. I’m not going to spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that very best hockey players are people who are talented and work hard but who also benefit from the weird and largely unexamined and peculiar ways in which their world is organized. I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there’s a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine year stretch turns out to have produced more Outliers than any other period in history. It’s remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely.

Readin’ me some hysterical books

NewMexiKen mentioned the other day that I was reading Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson.

I’ve completed the book. If you are knowledgeable about the Civil War and want McPherson’s take on the juggling the commander in chief managed so well — “policy, national strategy, military strategy, operations and tactics” — it’s a good read. There are, however, better studies of Lincoln and better studies of the battles. The best single volume on the Civil War is McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.

I’ve begun David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream, a new biography of Samuel Champlain, explorer and founder of Canada. Champlain and French Canada are subjects that interest me, and Fischer is just about the best historian writing today.

What I’m reading

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson.

McPherson, retired professor from Princeton and the leading writer of his generation on the War of the Rebellion, describes the political, strategic and personnel issues Lincoln faced managing the War. It’s a well-paced narrative focusing on the Commander in Chief, not the armies.

Hello, Everybody!: The Dawn of American Radio by Anthony Rudel.

Rudel has written a topical history of early radio — commercial development, sports, news, religion, entertainment. Informative and interesting, but I’m nearly half way in and have set it aside as a little too inclusive and with insufficient storytelling. Good enough that I expect to get back to it when I finish McPherson, though.

Best line of the day, so far

“If you had the power to pick your next-door neighbors, you would pick Tony and Marie Hillerman. They are smart, funny, compassionate, unpretentious human beings God gave us as something to strive toward.”

Jim Belshaw, Albuquerque Journal

NewMexiKen has read most of Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee mysteries, and more, and I’ve been wanting to say something about him since his death at age 83 Sunday here in Albuquerque. I’ll let Belshaw’s line serve.

List of National Book Awards Finalists

American conflicts — from slavery to the Civil War to the war on terror — dominated the non-fiction finalists for the National Book Awards, which were announced on Wednesday.

“The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, a chronicle of the Bush administration in the post-9/11 era by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was joined by Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” a historical account of that war’s massive death toll; Annette Gordon-Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” a biography of the slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson; and Jim Sheeler’s “Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives,” adapted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the Rocky Mountain News about soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The category was rounded out by Joan Wickersham’s personal memoir “The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order.”

The finalists in the fiction category offered a mixture of veterans and new authors. The five nominees include “Home: A Novel,” the third novel by Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for her 2004 novel “Gilead”; “Shadow Country,” by Peter Matthiessen, a founder of the Paris Review; and “The Lazarus Project,” by the Bosnian author Aleksandar Hemon. They are joined by Rachel Kushner’s debut novel “Telex From Cuba” and “The End,” the first novel by Salvatore Scibona.

The New York Times

Winners will be announced November 19th.

Who he is

I’ve noticed throughout this campaign, by the way, that there are two kinds of Obama supporters: those who have read “Dreams From My Father” and those who haven’t. The ones who have read it tend to be impatient with certain of the stock observations made by nonreaders of all political persuasions—comments like “We don’t know all that much about him” or “I’m not sure who he is, really.” Who he is is right there on the page. Or on the CD: I’ve also noticed that those who have absorbed “Dreams” via the audiobook version, read by the author (who reproduces his characters’ accents), are the most fervent of all.

Hendrik Hertzberg

America

Does the palpable ignorance around the election make you want to learn more about this country’s history?

In its December 2004 issue, American Heritage published an extensive and valuable bibliography of American history.

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.

The list is worth consulting.

By the way, Gore Vidal’s novel Lincoln makes the list. As noted below, Vidal is 83 today.

H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken

… essayist and editor, was born on September 12th in 1880. I’ve posted many of these before, but Mencken has some great lines that I never tire of reading:

  • Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
  • A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
  • It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
  • The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
  • It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
  • Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
  • No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
  • Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
  • I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Recommended

NewMexiKen has finished with last week’s New Yorker and three items that are online merit your consideration.

Anthony Lane writes about the second week of the Olympics in Letter from Beijing. It’s a superb piece, especially as a counterweight to the TV coverage. Strongly recommended.

Ryan Lizza writes about politics in Colorado and the new Democratic party in The Code Of The West. Insightful.

And Janet Frame’s 1954 short story Gorse Is Not People is as sad a piece of short fiction as you’d ever care to read.

Born Standing Up

NewMexiKen picked up Steve Martin’s 2007 memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life last night around 10:30 and stayed with it to the end, about three hours later.

Martin calls this book a biography “because I am writing about someone I used to know.” The comedian was among the biggest draws ever when he walked away from stand up in 1981, never to return. The book is the story up to that time. His first job, at age 10, was selling guides at Disneyland (he rode his bike to work).

It’s well-written, fast-paced, just enough about each phase of growing up and becoming “a wild and crazy guy.” Unlike many memoirs, it’s rarely what I’d call self-indulgent.

NewMexiKen was never what you’d call a fan of Martin. I thought he was funny when I caught him on Saturday Night Live and I’ve always enjoyed Roxanne, but not one who bought the albums or wore arrows on my head while waiting for a concert. I heard a podcast of Martin with Charlie Rose (speaking of self-indulgent) last week however, and got the book. I am a fan now.

Exactly the Country for This Old Man

Cormac McCarthy is 75 today.

The Writer’s Almanac has a good short profile that includes this:

It wasn’t until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 that McCarthy finally became widely recognized. It’s about a 16-year-old Texas rancher who leaves his family and rides into northern Mexico looking to make his fortune. None of McCarthy’s first five novels had sold more than 2,500 hardcover copies, but All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award and sold almost 200,000 copies in less than six months. It’s since been made into a Hollywood movie. McCarthy used the money to buy a new truck.

And there’s this 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.

And, of course, McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was made into last year’s Oscar winner for best picture. The Coen brothers won the Oscar for best adaptation, but the movie quite faithfully follows what McCarthy had written.

Works Progress Administration

Curious to know a bit more about the Works Progress Administration — the folks that built all those bridges you still see when you drive two lane highways? Or that wrote those wonderful state guides?

The New York Times has a concise description of the program accompanying a series of articles about WPA-related projects.

Recommended.

And here’s another related and interesting article — Going Down the Road – Places Captured in Time, but Not Frozen There.

“The American Guide Series of books, … was produced during the Depression by the Federal Writers’ Project and has become part of the canon of American travel writing.”

And I found this in a U.S. Senate document:

The American Guide Series is a highly collectible set of books; many people search the shelves of antiquarian book shops in an attempt to bring together the entire series. The Guide Series’ value continues to increase, with some titles now worth several hundred dollars. Two of the more desirable titles include the first edition Idaho volume, most of which were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and the Dakota volumes, which had very limited printings. The recent popularity of the series has also prompted publishing houses to reissue selected titles in attractive and affordable paperback editions.

‘The Dumbest Generation’

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

So begins a review by Lee Drutman of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation. Gonna bother clicking and reading it?

David McCullough

Historian and author David McCullough is 75 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.”