Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / A James Agee Festival

All that seems missing from The Library of America's celebration of the life and career of novelist/screenwriter James Agee is a slipcase for the two volumes it comprises. The first groups together his novels Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family, a Pulitzer Prize winner, as well as Agee's shorter fiction. Famous Men was produced in response to a commission by Fortune  Magazine to document the lives  of sharecroppers in the  American  South and put Agee together with iconic photographer Walker Evans. The cherry on the Agee sundae for readers is  a stunning 64-page insert of Evans's photographs, which could be a  book in themselves.

Agee on Film, the second volume, gathers Agee's film reviews, including those he did for years for The Nation, as well as including book reviews, uncollected  writing on the art of film and Agee's own script for Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter. A final fillip is the addition of a brown silk bookmark attached to each book, something seldom seen any more in anything other than antique books or collectors' volumes.

Book Alert / The Shame of the Nation

Like him or hate him, everyone who has read Jonathan Kozol's  passionate analyses of American education agree that  he takes no prisoners in his role as the self-appointed conscience of equal opportunity in education. Kozol, who has written 10 books on education, sounds his latest call to arms in The Shame of the Nation -- The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

Lest anyone think that the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education ended the notion of segregated education in America, Kozol argues that in  the past 15 years, a resegregation of public school education has taken place, which puts many schoolchildren in the same or worse position than if they attended school during the 1950s.

Invoking the specter of apartheid is classic Kozol, but unlike many writers who overreach to get attention, he is dogged in documenting the data he has gathered from visits to 60 public schools across the country in the past few years. That education in America is working, he says, "is one of those deadly lies, which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of  Americans...."

History Wire encourages all Americans to read this book, but be sure to stock in a supply of Excedrin first.

Book Alert / Lovesick Blues

A biographer following on the heels of others who have written about his subject needs to find a way to gain the kind of traction that leapfrogs him to the head of the pack. Paul Hemphill, author of Lovesick Blues  -- The Life of Hank Williams, acknowledges 1970 and 1994 biographies of the country legend, but his publisher reminds us  that their authors were both non-Southerners.

No one would accuse Hemphill, author of 15 books about the blue-collar South, of being a non-Southerner, and he starts his book with a chapter about his marathon travels over hardscrabble roads as a 13-year-old with his truckdriver father, the radio tuned to country stations, just so you won't forget it.

Normally, a 207-page book would be stretching to call itself a biography, but in Williams's case, size meets pathos, for Hemphill's subject lived only 29 years and had a career for no more than 6. Blame substance abuse, foreshadowing perhaps the death of rock icon Janis Joplin a generation later.

Given the industry that survives Hank Williams 52 years after his death, one can better appreciate Hemphill's wry comment that "His death while at the top of his game was, as the saying goes, a good career move."

Inevitably, the question arises of how Hank Williams would have fared in competition with Elvis Presley, whose career began just a few years after Williams's death. Hemphill's take is insightful"

    "....at heart a Hank Williams song depended on themes drawn from despair and disappointment.....America  had gotten enough of all that when the fifties arrived, with its newfound  muscle and hope for a brighter future, and the time had come to celebrate. 'Jailhouse Rock' and 'Blue Suede Shoes,' noisy blatherings whose bouncy lyrics were beside the point, fit the bill."

 

Book Alert / New York Stories

Millions share the feeling that we don't get enough time in New York. But those of us who indulge in the luxury of reading the daily Times knows that perusing the City Section really puts us as close as we could be without hopping a train. So many of its regular contributors are nationally-known, from Mel Gussow to Witold Rybczynski, from Robert Lipsyte to Joe Queenan.

Now comes New York Stories -- The Best of the City Section of The New York Times, a compendium of 40 essays culled from the City Section over the past 5 years, grouped into thematic headings, such as A Sense of Place, Moods and Mores, and City Lore. The range of subject matter is as varied as New York City itself -- the botanicas of Spanish Harlem, the sinking of the H.M.S. Hussar in 1780 near Hell Gate, why New Yorkers whine even though their sports teams win so much, and a walk through the clouds with a window washer. Its editor is Constance Rosenblum

Book Alert / The Vendetta

Back in the day, sons avenged their fathers' deaths or reputations by the sword. In our more civilized  age (wait, what am I saying?), the younger generation still seeks revenge but often with the pen, which exposes filial bias more easily than a simple knife thrust through the heart.

Pathos attends these attempts. How wonderful to have a son willing to go to the mat to reclaim the reputation of a parent and yet how sad he needs to. But how much better than the genre that Christina Crawford helped create a generation ago in writing Mommy Dearest, which trashed her mother, actress Joan Crawford.

About the same time, Tony Hiss wrote a passionate defense of his father, Alger Hiss, although it doesn't seem to have been enough to resurrect Hiss's reputation. And now, Alston Purvis, sole surviving child of Melvin Purvis, weighs in with The Vendetta, a recounting of his father's war against crime and how FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover turned against Purvis when he sensed he was getting too big for his britches and vowed to bring him down.

For those not alive in 1934, Purvis headed Hoover's war on such gangsters as Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. Soon, celebratory flashbulbs were lighting up Purvis's face, not Hoover's. While one could hardly expect Purvis's account to be objective, we've learned  over the last generation how insecure and perhaps even unbalanced the FBI director was, so son Alston's argument that Hoover couldn't stand more than one hero at the FBI seems hardly implausible.

Steve Goddard

Book Alert / A Wild Perfection

Lest anyone forget, the day is fast approaching when the computer's delete key will have obliterated much of our understanding of how a writer came to produce his oeuvre. Brilliant literary stars currently in their 20s and 30s are already advancing mightily in their craft but leaving no footprints as they do.

All of which makes books like A Wild Perfection -- The Selected Letters of James Wright the more precious. For the poet's wife, Anne Wright, and Saundra Rose Maley, who has specialized  in Wright's poetry for years, have edited some 35 years of Wright's correspondence, dating all the way back to his high school years.

The book's editors, in a  nice touch, have substituted for back-of-jacket blurbs snippets of letters to colleagues and  friends, such as this, to Theodore Roethke in 1958:

    "Last evening, I got to fooling around and I, so to speak, fell into the middle section of the poem, and thrashed around and broke it all up and threw pieces  out the window,  and  I wrote the sketch, appallingly Biblical and wild, for that middle section. Either I've written my first good poem, or else I've produced a  piece of pompous balderdash. I honest to God don't know. I'll send it soon."

The meanderings of a madman or the searchingly frank musing of a creative genius? Only because of Wright's hundreds of surviving letters do we, as readers, have the luxury to decide for ourselves.

Will History Repeat Itself?

Glen Campbell's hit of a generation ago by the name of Galveston haunts many of us today as the mega-hurricane Rita lumbers towards that Texas city. "Galveston, oh Galveston," Campbell sang, "I still hear your sea waves crashing." In Texas lore, the very vulnerability of the Gulf Coast city adds to its allure, with its manmade 17-foot seawall marking its own challenge to Mother Nature. Now, as weather forecasters predict 20-foot surges, the deserted city awaits the unknown.

The Galveston seawall was a reaction to Galveston's worst tragedy by far, what Erik Larson calls "the drowning of Galveston" in his gripping epic, Isaac's Storm, which relates the events of September 8, 1900. The book is especially notable for its recounting of how the embryonic U.S.  Weather Bureau tried in vain to keep track of the storm and what it learned from this disaster, to help it build a  more effective monitoring program.

Book Alert / 1491

"All together, class: In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." In such fashion, most of us learned about the "birth" of American culture. The latest to stick his finger in the eye of that conventional wisdom is Charles C. Mann, a journalist who happened upon the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in 1983 and found that the advanced civilization evident there was starkly at odds with what  he had learned in school.

So after following his nose for a generation, Mann wrote a book describing his take on the  demography, origins  and ecology of Indian culture of the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere. While classroom teachers have conceded, as a rule, that some nomadic tribes occupied the Americas before Columbus, the idea that anything like a civilized culture prevailed there is absent from most textbooks.

In fact, asserts Mann, more people lived in the Americas in 1491 than in Europe, certain of its cities far exceeded the population of major European capitals, and residents there bred corn by a process that some consider man's greatest genetic engineering achievement. Historian Joseph Ellis calls 1491 -- New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus "the most elegant synthesis of the way we were before the European invasion."

Book Alert / Raceday

Sports writer Max Watman will never  be confused with Roger Kahn or Frank DeFord, who write with a finely-calibrated  scalpel while Watman uses a hammer. But then Kahn and DeFord didn't have the delicious idea to fold the greatest moments of horseracing history into one slim volume for your reading enjoyment.

I confess to not being one of those loyal racing buffs who place $2 bets day  after day at Aqueduct or Saratoga but rather a seeker of cheap thrills, who mixes his mint juleps without fail the first Saturday of May and gets caught up in the month-long frenzy as the Kentucky Derby winner seeks to prevail in the Preakness. I've even been known to whip up a batch of White Carnations for the running of the Belmont, hoping upon hope to see another triple-crown winner in my lifetime.

Watman's style is set to appeal to the general reader as well as the horsey set, and  his chapters are as much about the time-honored venues of racing as well as the drama of the  race itself -- places like Churchill Downs, Santa Anita and Hialeah. He weaves in the history of the racetrack so that by race time, the reader feels himself there. The holiday gift giver would be entirely appropriate in giving Raceday to the casual race watcher as well as the afficionado.

Some of racing's great moments that Watman captures include Man o' War losing the only race of  his career at Saratoga, Secretariat losing the Wood  Memorial at Aqueduct after having captured the Triple Crown, and only last year, Smarty Jones winning the Kentucky Derby and Preakness only to fall narrowly short of a Triple Crown title at the Belmont.

Book Alert / Edmund Wilson -- A Life in Literature

Few literary critics deserve a biography of their own, but most would agree that if anyone does it's Edmund Wilson, whose prose contributions to The New Republic and The New Yorker from the 1920s to the 1960s chronicled the raging turmoil of those decades. Now comes Lewis M. Dabney with Edmund Wilson -- A Life in Literature, which its publisher describes as Wilson's "definitive biography." Library Journal, in a starred  review, tends to agree, calling it a  "comprehensive, well-researched biography (which) deserves a place  in any upper-level literature collection."

Dabney's acquaintance with Wilson is far more than casual. A professor of English at the University of Wyoming, he has studied Wilson since the 1960s and, in fact, edited his last journal, The Sixties, published in 1993. His work doesn't pretend to be a very critical study -- in fact, his publisher describes the work as an authorized biography.

What makes Wilson's biography compelling is not simply his trenchant observations on life and literature but rather his own complex and troubled life, from his affair with poet Edna St.  Vincent  Millay and three failed marriages to his friendships with writers Anais Nin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot. Like any good biography, Dabney is able to place Wilson in the turbulent context of his times -- and what times they were!