Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / One Night in a Bad Inn

One Night in a Bad Inn -- A True Story by Christy Leskovar, Pictorial Histories '06, $24.95, 594 pages, ISBN #1-57510-123-8. Bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Driving through rundown Butte, Montana today isn't likely to be the highlight of anyone's vacation. But Butte had its day nearly a century ago, as an industrial metropolis that melded the sophisticated East with the swashbuckling West. It is this Butte that Christy Leskovar transports her readers to in penning this tribute to her maternal grandparents and great-grandparents.

While a true story, Leskovar tells it like a mystery, in which a corpse is found in the ruins of a fire-ravaged homestead, leading to an investigation, all set against the background of World War I, then raging in Europe. For spice, there's a beautiful Welsh orphan, a "bawdy boarding house matron," and a handsome Irish miner. Just as The Unsinkable Molly Brown vowed to triumph over circumstance for a better life in newly-emergent Denver, Leskovar's Aila wins the empathy of her readers with her grit and determination.

Cuban Emigre Turns Life Story Into Drama

The Columbus (OH) Dispatch:

"Andy Garcia was a 5-year-old native of Havana when Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. The relatively affluent Garcia family fled to Miami, where Andy grew up, but his native country’s political convulsions clearly stamped the adult.

"Garcia has turned the Cuban tragedy into a long, brooding, often-rambling drama called The Lost City. It boasts heartfelt moments and intriguing twists of family history, but it also drags during repetitious scenes and tries to mix graphic carnage with stylized romanticism. The result leaves the viewer as dizzy as a deep drag on one of the movie’s huge cigars."

Garcia plays Fico Fellove, owner of a popular Havana nightclub that caters to the island’s wealthy minority and political leaders.

Archaeologists' Iran Find Believed to be Noah's Ark

ABC News:

"A team of Texas archaeologists believe they may have located the remains of Noah's Ark in Iran's Elburz mountain range. 'I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark,' said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration (B.A.S.E) Institute, a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.

"Bonnema and the other B.A.S.E. Institute members hiked for seven hours in the mountains northwest of Tehran, climbing 13,000 feet before making the apparent discovery. 'We got up to this object, nestled in the side of a hill,' said Robert Cornuke, a member of the B.A.S.E. Institute. 'We found something that has my heart skipping a beat.'"

Book Alert / Telegraph Days -- A Novel

Telegraph Days -- A Novel by Larry McMurtry, Simon & Schuster '06, $25, 289 pages, 0-7432-5078-8.

It's undeniably the job of book jacket copy writers to grab a prospective reader and shake him by the lapels. But overplay your hand and you risk losing a customer. Such is the dilemma McMurtry's publisher faces in comparing his new 289-page novel to the 864-page Pulitzer Prize winner Lonesome Dove: Not since its publication, he says, "has there been a novel like this one -- another big, brilliant, unputdownable saga of the West..." Pulleeezze!

None of which should denigrate the Western writings of Larry McMurtry, among the best if not the best, of their genre. Those who like High Noon shootem-ups will surely warm to a setup in which our hero, Jackson Courtright, working as a sheriff's deputy to keep body and soul together after his father's suicide, faces down the six brutal Yazee brothers in a kill or be killed showdown.

Jackson's sister Nellie, telegrapher for a Western town, is a magnet for the young and eligible, including such memorable Western figures as Buffalo Bill and Doc Holliday. She just happens by when the Battle of O.K. Corral is being waged and, in her twilight years, watches the West she actually lived being portrayed on the silver screen.

Book Alert / A History of Love

The History of Love -- A Novel by Nicole Krauss, Norton '06, $23.95, 252 pages, ISBN #0-393-06034-9.

As Saul Bellow dies and Philip Roth ages, it's clear the old order of the Jewish experience has begun to pass from the scene. So it's heartening to welcome young fresh voices, such as 32 year-old Nicole Krauss, whose debut novel Man Walks Into a Room was named The Los Angeles Times's Book of the Year.

The protagonist in Krauss's latest work is an elderly Polish immigrant, who six decades earlier wrote a book, a character in which inspired one reader to name her female child Alma. As the plot develops, Alma receives a letter which causes her to seek out her namesake for the purpose of saving her family. Novelist Elizabeth Berg calls Krauss "proof positive that great literature is being written today."

Interstates Created a Half-Century Ago Today

A Democratic Congress legislated the 48,000-mile Interstate Defense Highway System 50 years ago today. Ironically, the Act was far smaller than that proposed two years earlier by President Eisenhower, whom many considered "a do-nothing president."

The complete story of how the Interstates came to be and the many legacies, both positive and negative, of the largest public works program in world history is told in Steve Goddard's Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century (Basic Books, 1994).

A Complete History of America in 90 Minutes?

The Baltimore Sun:

"The Reduced Shakespeare Company is always happy to appear at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. The theater's intimacy 'helps with the kind of thing we do: cutting out the important characters and getting right to the sex and killing,' said cast member Austin Tichenor.

"The kings of condensation are back for their fifth run at the Kennedy Center with All the Great Books (abridged) and The Complete History of America (abridged), each of which squeezes years of scholarly studies into about 90 minutes of wacky, fast-paced comedy. 'Why they keep booking us, I have no idea,' said Tichenor, co-writer and co-director of both shows. 'We love to get into the most prestigious place we can and act silly.' Tichenor stars in both Kennedy Center productions with Reed Martin, also co-writer and co-director of both plays, and Adam Long.

"Combine Saturday Night Live's ridiculousness with Monty Python's social commentary, throw in some extra cross-dressing and you get the picture. Originating as a California fair act in 1981, the company is perhaps best known for its original production, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)."

A New Interpretation of King Lear

The New Yorker:

"The radicalism of Alvin Epstein’s portrayal of the title character in 'King Lear' (an Actors’ Shakespeare Project production at the La MaMa E.T.C. Annex) has as much to do with Epstein’s body as with his mind. Traditionally, directors have filled this big role with a big man, or, at any rate, with the kind of actor who can send the 'howl, howl, howl, howl' of Lear’s paternal grief and madness pounding like a bass drum through the gaps in our self-possession.

"Epstein, however, who played Lucky in the New York première of Samuel Beckett’s 'Waiting for Godot,' and Clov in the first American staging of Beckett’s 'Endgame,' approaches the role in a way that is neither self-conscious nor grand. Slight and shaggy-haired, he hops about the stage with what seems to be a childlike enthusiasm for the play; he is the least physically prepossessing Lear in recent memory. Instead of dwelling on the big round sounds of this lost king, Epstein slithers through Shakespeare’s text like an aged but guileful salamander.

"He flicks his tongue into the linguistic honey pot of this epic poem on the delusions of the mind and of power, only to extract it coated in the bitterness of one who will not survive his grief, or the burden of self-knowledge. 'No, no, no life?' Lear pleads to the lifeless body of his favorite daughter, Cordelia (Sarah Newhouse). 'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?'”

Superman Redux Based on 1978 Superman

The Baltimore Sun:

"The best comic-book movies and fantasy films have spoiled us. They've already given us a sublime comedy-drama about a lovelorn superhero in Spider-Man 2 and a religious fable with energy as well as allegory in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

"Compared with them, Superman Returns is slavishly reverential and morose - The Passion of the Christ from Krypton, with a sad, erratic pulse. (In its defense, it does have a subtly retro, illuminated-manuscript kind of beauty.) The film, which opens tonight at select theaters and tomorrow nationwide, presents the Man of Steel as a messiah from the pages of The Da Vinci Code. Its one good running joke is the way everyone wonders how far Lois Lane went with the big guy in the past, when she spent the night with him. Too much of the rest plays like a near-death experience.

"Forty-year-old filmmaker Bryan Singer models this film on the 1978 Superman, which introduced Christopher Reeve in the title role. Director Richard Donner began his movie with a child flipping through the first adventures of the Man of Steel - a devotional opening that Hollywood typically used for Bible tales or Dickens. For those who were 13 back then, like Singer, or those who were 13 at heart, Donner's combination of hero-worship and what he called 'verisimilitude' clicked. Superman was a smash. Even those of us who thought it was a clunker knew it laid the groundwork for a true pop masterpiece, Richard Lester's Superman II (1981)."

Book Alert / Terrorist

Terrorist -- A Novel by John Updike, Knopf '06, $24.95, 310 pages, ISBN #0-307-26465-3.

The problem of the 20th century, predicted black sociologist W.E.B. DuBois in 1903, will be the problem of the color line. Regrettably, were he alive today, DuBois would have to agree that the color  line continues as a major impediment to a harmonious American society. The problem of the 21st century -- at least as judged by its infant years -- will be terrorism. So it's natural that John Updike, uburban chronicler extraordinaire, would want to take a whack at a subject that will clearly bedevil his fellow citizens long after he is gone before he puts down his talented pen for good.

But terrorism is largely an urban problem. "I rob banks," serial robber Willie Sutton used to say, "because that's where the money is." And the city is where the people are -- people to kill and maim. Updike's experience of living in cities ended nearly a half-century ago, and he has lived in Massachusetts suburbs since. Perhaps that's why his new novel sounds faintly, sometimes clangingly, off key.

Updike's compelling protagonist is Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an 18 year old finishing his last high school semester in a small, down-at-the-heels city in northern New Jersey. His long-departed father was an Arab drifter; his mother, a flaky promiscuous Irish-American. While his mother does keep a roof over his head and food in his belly, Ahmad has, in many ways, raised himself, groping to gain a sense of right and wrong and to find a spiritual foothold. He is, any parent would agree, a good boy. Rather than being driven from his father because of his neglect, Ahmad is attracted to the Arab world and to Islam in a desire to know the missing piece. Updike tells us that seven years earlier, Ahmad discovered a mosque in his town, found acceptance there, and now is a committed follower of Islam, committed also to jihad.

Updike spends two-thirds of his novel, probably longer than necessary, in fleshing out his characters prior to setting the action plot in motion. He draws finely-etched portraits of Ahmad's 40-year-old mother and his weary 63-year-old guidance counselor, Jack Levy, who often visits the Mulloy home. These two unlikely lovers soon fall into bed -- just Updike being Updike.

Given the circumstances of his raising, Ahmad is too articulate by half, often using phrases that one finds it hard to imagine even a high school valedictorian using. And in spite of his lengthy setup, Updike shares little with his reader of how Ahmad fell under the Islam thrall as an 11-year-old. But as a master, Updike the conductor melds the strings and brass creatively to build his symphony to a crescendo. It would be unfair to the reader to reveal the denouement. Suffice it to say it is incongruous and unsatisfying, given the buildup that leads the reader on.