Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / Afterlands

Afterlands: A Novel by Steven Heighton, Houghton-Mifflin, $25, 406 pages, ISBN #0-618-13934-6.

The known facts that form the skeleton of this historical novel are sketchy, but given these elements, it's clear that the potential for drama is great. The Arctic explorer USS Polaris becomes stranded in Arctic ice, forcing 19 humans aboard to disembark onto an ice floe on which they live for more than six months while they pray for rescue.

Add in the elements of food shortages, extreme cold, leadership egos, and racial and sexual tensions, and a  writer can project a humdinger of a story, as Heighton does, admittedly having to fill in many blanks as he goes. But unlike a James Frey memoir, he admits up front how little he knows about what actually happened and how much he must fabricate and labels his work, as he clearly should, as a novel.

Afterlands opens at a time following the siege and rescue, with lifetime friendships and enmities already cast in stone and then works backward, a device which can be confusing -- or less than illuminating -- at times. Heighton, however, is a wonderful writer and expertly casts, with dramatic tension, the interplay between two protagonists -- Lt. George Tyson, one of the victims on the ice floe, and German crewman Roland Kruger, who believes "the idiot willingness to take sides is what feeds the abattoir of history."

Book Alert / All Will Be Well

All Will Be Well -- A Memoir by John McGahern, Knopf '06, $25, 289 pages, ISBN #1-4000-4496-0.

Fate dealt John McGahern a cruel blow by endowing him with a gentle, supportive mother and a violent, insensitive father and then letting him watch as the better of the two died of breast cancer when he was only nine. The oldest of seven children, McGahern somehow coped with the kind of father who wouldn't attend his children's weddings and finally escaped into the world, writing from such diverse posts as Spain, London, Helsinki and Paris as he forged an award-winning writing career.

When Americans think of Ireland, we tend to imagine such well-known counties as Cork, Killarney, and Galway. But McGahern hailed from a lesser-known place called County Leitrim, at the juncture of Northern and Southern Ireland. In his memoir, McGahern uses the skills that helped him write six novels and four collections of short stories to limn the rural highways and byways of the territory he left in his youth only to return to in his later years. "The people and the language and landscape....were like my breathing," he says.

It's unfortunate that McGahern's memoir contains no illustrations. And, while this perhaps shouldn't matter, the book is one continuous narrative, without chapter separations. Readers whose habits are like this reviewer like to finish a chapter before shutting off the light, knowing that a fresh chapter, with perhaps a new angle or anecdote, awaits them the next day.

LA Times Reports Death of One of Its Own

"Had Otis Chandler never worked a single day, his would have been a memorable life," reports The Los Angeles Times. An Olympic-caliber athlete, a champion weightlifter, an accomplished race car driver, big game hunter, surfer, cyclist, antique car and motorcycle collector, Chandler, who died Monday at 78, was a man whose avocations alone were the stuff of legend.

"But Chandler did work, and in a remarkable 20-year span as publisher of the Los Angeles Times — from 1960 to 1980 — he reshaped this newspaper to an extent that has few, if any, parallels in the history of American journalism. 'No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did,' David Halberstam wrote in "The Powers That Be," his 1979 book about the news media."

Lost Civilization Unearthed

The Associated Press reports that scientists have found what they believe are traces of the lost Indonesian civilization of Tambora, which was wiped out in 1815 by the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

"Mount Tambora's cataclysmic eruption on April 10, 1815, buried the inhabitants of Sumbawa Island under searing ash, gas and rock and is blamed for an estimated 88,000 deaths. The eruption was at least four times more powerful than Mount Krakatoa's in 1883. Guided by ground-penetrating radar, U.S. and Indonesian researchers recently dug in a gully where locals had found ceramics and bones. They unearthed the remains of a thatch house, pottery, bronze and the carbonized bones of two people, all in a layer of sediment dating to the eruption."

Palme's Killer At Large After 20 Years

"Embedded in a sidewalk, a small bronze plaque marks the spot where Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in Stockholm, Sweden 20 years ago Tuesday," reports the Associated Press. "The modest commemoration, for the only western European head of government murdered since World War II, belies the profound impact the unsolved murder had on Sweden."

"The shots piercing the night sky on Feb. 28, 1986, also killed Sweden's self-image as a haven from political violence. Two decades later, Palme's family and friends lament that his political legacy is still clouded by conspiracy theories surrounding the murder. 'It just goes on and on. Of course it overshadows my father's contributions, which are not mentioned,' his son, Marten Palme, told The Associated Press."

Book Alert / A Year With Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A Year With Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings and Sermons, foreword by Jim Wallis, HarperSan Francisco, $19.95, 402 pages, ISBN #0-06--088408-8.

Clergymen and clergywomen, ministering to their parishes, learn the balance between inspiring with Christ's message to the faithful and calling parishoners to leave their domestic lives, to commit themselves totally to his teachings. Many of us want to feel we've experienced a profound life experience during the sermon, but most of us aren't quite ready to sell all our belongings and give our everyday lives to those who have nothing.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer eschewed that balance. "When Christ calls a man," Bonhoeffer said, "he bids him to come and die." And die, he did in 1945, after helping orchestrate an unsuccessful plot to bring Adolf Hitler down, ironically only months before Hitler would end his own life.

Now Bonhoeffer's followers and those who seek new inspiration can keep a daily devotional of Bonhoeffer's writings on social conscience, spiritual wisdom, pastoral care and other insights drawn from his 39 years of life, the same as enjoyed by another martyr, Martin Luther King, Jr. That is, the book is divided into 365 sections, Jan. 1 -- Dec. 31. The book includes a foreword by Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics.

Book Alert / Letters to a Young Actor

Letters to a Young Actor -- A Universal Guide to Performance by Robert Brustein, Basic Books '05, $22.50, 234 pages, ISBN #0-465-00806-2, index, unillustrated.

A generation ago, I stumbled upon a book by Mr. Brustein's former Yale colleague, entitled Letters to a Young Doctor. Written by Dr. Richard Seltzer, a surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital and a faculty member at Yale Medical School, it shares with new and prospective doctors the spiriitual experience implicit in a surgeon sinking his hands into a patient's innards, with the risk and opportunity that his actions at that moment could kill or heal. Seltzer travelled periodically to underserved areas of Latin America and describes a desperately ill young child brought to him, who died on the table. Grieving and angry over his thwarted need to help, he irrationally decided to repair the hare lip of the tiny corpse. When her mother saw her child's body, she thanked Seltzer profusely for fixing the lip, feeling that would make her more pleasing to her Creator.

Seeing the very similar title of Brustein's book, I looked forward to reading the kind of spiritual take on a profession that Seltzer had written, particularly since it was penned by an artiste rather than a nuts-and-bolts physician. But it was not to be, and I feel thereby Brustein missed an opportunity. Instead, I read a how-to book, not too different than those that fill the business shelves of bookstores.

That said, Brustein is very good at the more modest task he has set out to do. His four decades of laboring in the theatrical vineyard as a professor, critic and steward of two of the nation's best schools of drama -- Yale and Harvard -- as well as creation of the Yale Repertory Theater and American Repertory Theater have given him an unparalleld overview of his profession that makes him truly wise.

Don't rush into theater, he has advised such students as Jane Fonda, who left college to pursue acting after a year. Instead, stay and soak up as much liberal education as you can, such as Meryl Streep at Vassar, Jodie Foster at Yale and Brooke Shields at Princeton. Make as many contacts as you can (what profession would advise against that?). Seize every opportunity to learn theater, especially through unpaid summer internships.

So Letters to a Young Actor is a worthy book for aspiring thespians or even those who simply love the theater. But one wishes Brustein had broadened his objective to examine the spiritual experience that lies in transforming oneself into another and communicating that persona to the public.

1966: Civil Rights Movement Heads North

"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took the civil rights movement north in July 1966," reports The Washington Monthly. "He began with a rally at Chicago's Soldier Field, one that was attended by 45,000 people, boycotted by Chicago's most influential black church leader who resented the intrusion of such a famous outsider on his turf, and picketed by the American Nazi Party.

"It was a very hot day, and King, who had arrived at Soldier Field in a white limousine, spoke from under a dainty parasol. He protested the invidiousness of subtle, Northern forms of racism and announced that he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would devote all of their resources to a non-violent campaign. Their new mission, he proclaimed, was to rid the city of the real-estate discrimination that prevented blacks from getting loans and rental contracts that might move them out of the ghetto, and the racial and regulatory failures that kept Chicago's slums subhuman.

"The speech over, Rev. King led 5,000 of his audience in a languorous line down to City Hall. It was a Sunday and the building was shuttered, so King tacked a list of his demands to the door, and the crowd went home. So began the confused, quixotic campaign that would consume much of the last two years of the civil-rights leader's life, an extended moment when King stopped looking like a heaven-sent prophet to many Americans and started looking like just another mixed-up liberal."

Is the Playground Blue or Red?

John R. MacArthur, writing in Harper's, examines the ambivalence of an urban playground:

"Every time I take my kids to the Tecumseh Playground, at 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in Manhattan, I'm troubled by a political paradox. On the one hand, this Western-themed lot for tots means to honor Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, of Confederacy-destroying and Indian-killing fame, as does the adjacent public school, which bears his full name. A placard at the playground entrance also touts Sherman's tour as a New Yorker, since the scourge of Atlanta and the Carolinas spent his theatergoing retirement in Gotham, living out his days on West 71st Street not far from Broadway.

"On the other hand, my local playground serves one of the most anti-war constituencies in America, the Upper West Side. Until the word liberal was banned from public discourse, most Upper West Siders militantly identified themselves as liberal—indeed, their steadfast support for peacenik politicians, from Adlai Stevenson to George McGovern to Howard Dean, is legendary. If New York State is blue, then my neighborhood is cobalt blue."

Book Alert / The Wit in the Dungeon

The Wit in the Dungeon -- The Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt -- Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics by Anthony Holden, Little Brown, $29.95, 430 pages, ISBN #0-316-06752-0, index, bibliography, source notes, chronology, two groupings of b&w glossy photos.

Leigh Hunt was a celebrity in the 19th century British literary community, but is hardly known today. But perhaps you've heard of some of his friends and writers he edited, people like Charles Lamb, John Keats, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth. But unlike America's Max Perkins a century on, he was also a playwright, poet, essayist and critic. And for fun, he hung with people like Thomas Carlyle; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.

But Anthony Holden's mission isn't merely to drop names but to inform his readers why Hunt played a major role in the Romantic Movement and, when jailed for insulting the Prince of Wales, "transformed his prison cell into a veritable literary salon.....He was so close to Percy Bysshe Shelley that he fought with Mary Shelley over possession of the young poet's heart after his tragic drowning (though eventually Hunt settled for his best friend's jawbone.)

Hunt's biographer tells us that his "friend" based "the freeloading character of Harold Skimpole from Bleak House on Hunt, who chronically was in debt and often asked for loans from Dickens." With friends like that.....