Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / Mozart and Leadbelly

Life in rural Louisiana has fueled the literary career of Ernest J. Gaines, most famously known as the author of the 1993 classic, A Lesson Before Dying, which has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide.  After a 40-year career in which he wrote 6 novels, Gaines seems to be summing up in his latest work, Mozart and Leadbelly, a compendium of stories and essays about his life.

Writers will appreciate Gaines's essay on "Writing A Lesson Before Dying." But the book isn't all shoptalk. He describes the people of his youth and how they shaped his writing, in such essays as "Miss Jane and I," "Mozart and Leadbelly," and "Aunty and the Black Experience in Louisiana." At 159 pages, it's a slim volume with essays and stories about 10-pages long, just long enough for bedtime reading.

Book Alert / Attack the Messenger

It's a given in a democratic society that politicians have a potentially adversary relationship with the Fourth Estate. But, says inside-the-Beltway commentator Craig Crawford in his new book, Attack the Messenger -- How Politicians Turn You Against the Media, that dynamic tension has now broken into "all-out war."

Great, let's watch 'em fight, you say. What worries Crawford about that, as his title implies, is that the ability of the press to do its job is impaired when its members become combatants in a hostile environment caused by politicians seeking to undermine those who cover them. In place of the traditional media (think White House correspondent Helen Thomas, for example) comes the "new media," from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart to Rush Limbaugh, whom Crawford characterizes as "opinion merchants." The loser, as he sees it: the American public.

Breaking 60 Years of Silence

In the  Los Angeles Times, a writer asks his Japanese-American inlaws about their experiences in World War II, long shielded by silence:

"Only as I sat in rush-hour traffic on Interstate 5, on my way to Garden Grove, did it occur to me that I might have conveyed the wrong impression to Ellen's parents. Since I was spending the week in Los Angeles on business, I had called her folks and invited myself down for dinner. Ellen and I had been dating for two years at that point, and all at once I realized that they might have drawn the logical inference from my call; it would have been reasonable to think that I was appearing at her parents' doorstep, alone and almost unannounced, to do that thing where you ask the father for his daughter's hand in marriage.

"In reality, it never would have occurred to me to discuss such matters with him. I'd met her parents only briefly, but already I had the impression that one did not broach topics such as love and devotion with George and Nancy. In Ellen's family, as in a lot of Japanese American families of her generation, life was better left unsaid."

Replacing Julie Andrews

"Julie Andrews says Cameron Diaz would be the perfect choice to play Maria if "The Sound of Music" is ever remade," according to the Associated Press. "Andrews starred in the best-picture Academy Award winner about a nun who leaves the convent behind to wed an Austrian widower (Christopher Plummer) and spread the "Do-Re-Mi" spirit to his seven kids.
At a question-and-answer session celebrating the 40th anniversary of the popular film, Andrews recalled the scene in which Maria runs through the mountains singing "The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Music."

Book Alert / A Revolution in Eating

After popping a couple of brewskis for himself and Martha, George Washington slipped in his wooden teeth as they sat down to their TV dinners, topped off by unwrapping a couple of ice cream bars from the frig.

OK, we know the colonists didn't eat that way, but did you ever ask yourself what they ate, how they prepared it, and where the ingredients came from? James E. McWilliams, a history professor at Texas State University, did, and his answers emerge in A Revolution in Eating -- How the Quest for Food Shaped America. Much of it isn't a pretty sight.

While a colonial family might have meat and vegetables for dinner, they took a different trip to get there than we do. A homemaker might start her day soaking corn kernels to soften them for pounding, then spend two hours with her children grinding them with mortar and pestle into cornmeal. Later for that, you say. Fine, come out to the barn where they're about to slaughter a piglet:

"It (the process) began with a rapid cut to the beast's throat, followed by a prolonged period of squealing and bloodletting. The beast was then scalded in a vat of boiling water to loosen its sharp and wiry bristles so they could be easily brushed off. Robert (a family son) gathered the offal (the word literally denotes the "off fall" after the slaughter) from the barn floor to make sausage."

In the course of his gastronomic peregrinations, McWilliams visits the customs and cuisine of the English West Indies, the New England colonies, the Chesapeake Bay Region and the Carolinas and discusses how colonists, through food, fashioned a culinary declaration of independence.

Review/Remembrance / Dream Boogie

As a teenager in Hartford in the late 1950s, Saturday afternoons at 2 ushered in the most golden hours of my week, when 90 cents would buy a ticket to the State Theater to hear live performances by such rock 'n roll stars as Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and The Silhouettes. Typically, performers of perhaps half of that week's top-ten 45 rpm disks were on the program. Such richness resulted in part from Hartford's closeness to New York City, allowing a group to do a matinee here, then drive to Manhattan for an evening gig.

For many of my friends, Saturday at the State Theater meant our first experience in mingling with people of color in the audience, as post-war suburbanization caused America to stratify even further by race. My white friends were nuts about rock music but had little appreciation of how the performers we cheered on had come to it or what it meant to them.

That's why I clamored eagerly to read Peter Guralnick's new Dream Boogie -- The Triumph of Sam Cooke. It seems overblown, at the least, to call a biography of a rock star magisterial, but there's no other word that better describes Guralnick's two-volume work on the life of Elvis Presley a few years ago. Magisterial, that is, in the sense of completeness and balance, of total immersion in the life of the subject. And folks, I'm pleased to say that Guralnick has done it again in Dream Boogie.

In the early 1950s, blacks and whites listened largely to music by performers from their own races. Within the Negro community, as it was then called, two music recording and performing industries existed side by side -- secular rhythm and blues running a parallel track with gospel. Many of the great r&b or rock stars got their start in gospel, sometimes as preachers' kids, such as Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke himself.

The first couple of hundred pages of this 651-page masterwork deal with the remarkably sophisticated gospel music industry, in which such groups as Cooke's Soul Stirrers toured the country, playing for paltry earnings at largely urban black churches, and recording religious music that might sell 20,000 to 30,000 records nationwide. Meanwhile, r&b was flourishing, and an offshoot called rock 'n roll, led by such pioneers as Bill Haley and the Comets, was promising to turn pop music on its ear.

In a capitalistic society, the saying goes, follow the money. And so such gospel singers as Sam Cooke fell under increasing pressure to "cross over" from black audiences to mixed ones, as whites seemed highly receptive to "black" music in a way that perhaps their parents did not. The lure of fame and fortune was irresistable.

Guralnick's biographical style could be taught in writing classes. He's one of the most erudite of biographers but without the distance at which some writers keep themselves from their subjects. He uses an unusual amount of dialog from his interviews, so the reader sometime feels he's in the same room with the subject and his friends. And remarkably, he doesn't limit the local patois to the dialog but injects it into his overall narrative so as to keep the transition seamless.

The family of Sam Cooke, born in 1931, was part of the Great Migration of blacks north from the American South in the early years of the century. The Cooks (Sam added the "e" for class later) settled in Chicago, which became a hotbed of black culture, as depicted in Nicholas Lemann's Promised Land in the early 1950s. And it was in this milieu that Cooke flourished in his early years.

As he made his inevitable crossover, Cooke moved to Los Angeles and the land of glitz and glitter, surrounded by fast cars, fast women, the best booze, and seemingly easy money. He spun increasingly out of control, as Elvis Presley would do some years later. His death at age 33 in 1964 came from a bullet inflicted by a hotel desk clerk in an altercation involving another woman.

Fans of the early days of rock 'n roll will revel in Guralnick's descriptions of such legendary performers as Clyde McPhatter, the Everly Brothers, LaVern Baker, Jackie Wilson and, in the early days, Mihalia Jackson. His renderings of how Cooke's famed million-sellers came to be -- that You Send Me was to be a throwaway B-side on a 45 featuring Summertime as its hit -- are illuminating.

Guralnick's book is important not only in the sense of the Greek tragedy of a gifted musician but as a way to understand how a largely segregated America breached the gap between the races, in part, because of musical culture. It will stand as a classic in its field.

Steve Goddard

Book Mention / The Foretelling

A woman of my close acquaintance calls Alice Hoffman's new book The Foretelling a fiction analog of Maureen Dowd's controversial book, Are Men Necessary? It's one of those welcome volumes (167 large-type pages) you can whip through in a long evening, depicting the lives of an Amazonian tribe of women, fueled by hatred of the opposite sex because one of the women, named Rain, is a child of a brutal rape by 50 men.

Traveling on the Russian steppes, the band of sisters capture men to procreate with but murder the male children of those unions. Applying a little math will suggest the outcome of such a world view.

Book Alert / Voltaire Almighty

Francois-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) may have been raised in a privileged world, but the questions raised about his parentage proved major forces in developing his characteristic edge, one that would make this multi-talented poet, novelist and playwright a major force in the European Enlightenment.

Roger Pearson, a professor of French at Oxford, is the latest to take on the task of biographying this complex and multi-layered man in Voltaire Almighty. Pearson's book is approached like a stage play, beginning with a 14-page dramatis personae and a six-page timeline before raising the curtain on the first act. The book is sourced, with notes, a selected bibliography and an index.

Booklist gave the book a starred review. Kirkus Reviews says, "Pearson marvelously encapsulates Voltaire the historian, fabulist, bon vivant and humanitarian activist. Thoroughgoing scholarship in a richly textured, readable account."

Book Alert / Forty Ways to Look at JFK

Forty-two years after Lee Harvey Oswald snuffed out the life of President John F. Kennedy, the Kennedy mystique continues, along with the quest to determine whether JFK was truly a great president or simply a creation of Madison Avenue and his handlers. Gretchen Rubin, an attorney who earned degrees  at Yale, Yale Law and clerked for Justice Sandra Day  O'Connor, understands full well how competent lawyers can craft comprehensive briefs for or against a proposition in the same way that authors have done in regard to President Kennedy.

With apologies implied to Wallace Stevens, who wrote Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Rubin hit upon a new way of looking at a historical figure in her Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. Now, she uses the same approach in Forty Ways to Look at JFK. Not a tendentious screed, rather the book bores in on several-page aspects of Kennedy's life, such as "Kennedy and Money: A Circumstance That Shaped Him" and "Kennedy's Use of the Media: How He Reached the Public." Sometimes they speak to two sides of a  question.

Does Rubin find Kennedy to have been a great president? "I  found that Kennedy was indeed historically important," she says. "But not for his policies or accomplishments -- which really weren't very significant -- but instead for his tremendous stature in people's imagination."

Book Alert / San Francisco Is Burning

It's hard to know how to categorize Dennis Smith's new book, San Francisco Is Burning. Subtitled The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires, and filled with photographs of the carnage wrought by the terrible catastrophe, it's clear the author and his publisher intend the reader to consider the work non-fiction.

But following the text, at the point where one would expect to find endnotes, is a curious comment, called "Author's Note," which reads, "This is not an academic work but a historical narrative, and I have not footnoted the facts so that the reader would not be diffused in the reading. However, all information contained in the book may be relied  upon as historically accurate."

Such historians as Barbara Tuchman, Robert Caro, and David McCullough, as respected as they are, have not purported to write "academic works," and their historical narratives are fully sourced. The author's wish not to "diffuse" the reader, while a curious choice of words, is disingenuous, since endnotes tucked away at the end of text can't possibly confuse or distract the reader. In short, the author is simply saying "trust me." Well, with all respect, I don't, any more than I expect my readers to trust my sourcing in the three books I have written.

All of which is really unfortunate because Smith brings so much to the  table, only to invite inevitable criticism because of his failures of attribution. He's the author of 11 books, a wonderful writer and a former firefighter, giving him insights which are particularly apt in the book he has chosen to write.

Smith does a fine job of developing the chief participants in his narrative as they pursue their quotidian tasks on the day of the earthquake, quite unaware that their lives are about to be changed forever. So when their world is turned upside down, we care, because Smith has made them three-dimensional flesh and blood figures for us.

Were Smith to present this tale as a historical novel, I'd rate it highly. It certainly works as fiction. But I'm afraid I cannot consider it a creditable work of non-fiction.