Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / Wizard of the Crow

Wizard of the Crow -- A Novel by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Pantheon '06, $30, 768 pages, ISBN #0-375-42248-X.

Being an icon of American literature is a lot easier than occupying the same niche in Africa. In spite of his controversial views, Philip Roth has never been imprisoned for his views, unlike Ngugi Wa Thiongo, who spent time in a Kenyan prison in 1977 in the wake of his book, Petals of Blood.

In his new comic novel, Thiong'o sets out to do nothing less than "to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history." He sets his tale in the fictional "Free Republic of Aburiria" and peoples it with such remarkable characters as the Wizard, a dispenser of folklore and wisdom, His High Mighty Excellency, the Christian Ministry, which is anything but Christian in its operation; and the Global Bank, an institution full of hanky-panky. Stir in a dose of human nature, and you have a potent, toxic stew.

Let's sample Thiong'o's lyrical writing:

"The illness, so claimed the first, was born of anger that once welled up inside him; and he was so conscious of the danger it posed to his well-being that he tried all he could to rid himself of it by belching after every meal, sometimes counting from one to ten, and other times chanting ka ke ki ko ku aloud. Why these particular syllables, nobody could tell. Still, they conceded that the Ruler had a point. Just as offensive gases of the constipated need to be expelled, thus easing the burden on the tummy, anger in a person also needs a way out to ease the burden on the heart. This Ruler's anger, however, would not go away, and it continued simmering inside till it consumed his heart. This is believed to be the source of the Aburirian saying that ire is more corrosive than fire, for it once eroded the soul of a Ruler."

"US. vs. John Lennon" Carries Lessons For Today

The Washington Post:

"One of the weirdest episodes in American history is engagingly chronicled in 'The U.S. vs. John Lennon,' David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's revelatory documentary about the American government's surveillance of the former Beatle in the 1970s.

"And readers tempted to write that episode off as yet another paranoid fantasy of The Left should take heed: 'The U.S. vs. John Lennon' includes the firsthand testimony of the spies themselves, from apostate FBI agents to the unapologetic G. Gordon Liddy. It's all there on the record, for the benefit of those who care enough about history not to repeat it. And at a time when the country is engaged in fresh debates about the fragile relationship between privacy and national security, this particular chapter seems worth revisiting.

"'The U.S. vs. John Lennon' opens in 1971, when Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, appeared at a fundraising concert for John Sinclair, best known to most music fans as the radical impresario behind the Detroit punk band the MC5. That appearance succeeded in getting Sinclair -- who was serving a 10-year sentence for handing undercover narcotics agents two marijuana joints -- released from jail. But it also brought Lennon straight into the cross hairs of Richard Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and, eventually, their fellows at the Immigration and Naturalization Service who for more than three years tried to have Lennon deported."

'30s Jazz Age Inspires OutKast

New York Daily News:

"Ask Andre Benjamin of OutKast why the jazzy splendor of the 1930s became the inspiration for the group's new movie and CD and he answers in a word: Wardrobe. 'People at the time just seemed a bit more classy in their dress, even if they didn't have much money,' he says.

"'The mentality of black people was so different back then,' adds OutKast's other member, Big Boi (Antwan Patton). 'People walked with their backs straight and their heads high. It was more adult. Nowadays, it's all about catering to the young generation. But, you know, you gotta grow up sometime.'

"OutKast has been working on that longer than most young musicians. Always part of hip hop's smart set, the duo broke through to a new level of creative maturity and popular success three years ago with the release of their double-barreled album 'Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.' The genre-smashing CD spawned two No. 1 hits, went platinum five times over, and bagged four major Grammys."

Book Alert / After This

After This -- A Novel by Alice McDermott, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux '06, $24, 279 pages, ISBN #0-374-16809-1.

Alice McDermott's disappointing new novel returns to the site of former triumph -- Long Island, where her portrayal of mid-20th century Irish Catholics in Charming Billy won her the National Book Award. Ironically, the qualities that made that book such a winner she has left out of or downplayed in this work.

The Irish have suffered more than their share of ethnic bias since famine started driving them from the Auld Sod in the mid-19th century. "No Irish Need Apply" notices greeted their applications for employment, and the race as a whole was wrongfully tarred with the reputation of hard-drinking knockabouts. The Interstate suburbs that sprang up all over America from the 1950s on offered a way for the urban Irish to forge a new, more prosperous, identity with their own front lawn and rear deck.

And so, in towns such as the Long Island communities McDermott portrays, new or expanded parishes grew up, with their own parochial schools, as their Father McShanes and Sister Marie Ignatiuses fought to keep the clerical ship afloat in the wake of the shockwaves from the Second Vatican Council, while honoring dogma drummed into them since birth. McDermott's communication of the atmospherics of this new church life is dead-on.

The author has joined such skillful writers as Anne Tyler and Sue Miller as storytellers who can keep readers on the edge of their seats without employing an action-driven narrative. A feel for family dynamics, observation of subtleties -- a raised eyebrow, the turn of a shoulder, a metaphorical stiff breeze outside -- communicate meaning to the reader as surely as words. Those elements, displayed in Charming Billy so amply, appear strangely absent here, leaving the overall story listless and flat.

Charming Billy opens with a post-funeral "party" -- does any ethnic group than the Irish call it that? -- at which, through laughs and tears, thoroughly-lubricated family and friends express appreciation for the dear departed. As an O'Connor on my mother's side, I've attended scores of such gatherings and find them so refreshingly real, unlike the affectation of long faces in post-funeral collations for those of other backgrounds.

So when Alice McDermott introduces us to John and Mary Keane and we watch their four children grow to adulthood, carefully sculpting their personalities so we come to care for them, the reader is poised to draw on at least two handkerchiefs when we learn of a family tragedy (not to give too much away). But the individual's loss and mourning period is strangely absent, as if the publisher had just omitted a chapter. McDermott is such a literary craftsperson that I'm sure she's done this intentionally, but in so doing, she's gone over my head.

The 1960s, in which most of the action take place, was such a tumultuous time in America that it seems strange and offputting that the author seems to place the Keanes in an Irish Catholic suburban cocoon, where they seem not to interact with or be impacted by the rest of the changing world. Most affecting is her portrayal of Pauline, Mary's former workmate, who watches Mary become a happy wife and mother, roles she can only dream of. When Pauline is unfortunately injured, with no one to care for her, the Keanes take her into their home permanently, and she becomes the sometimes loved, sometimes resented maiden aunt in the back bedroom.

After This feels as if the author is experimenting with a new narrative style, perhaps as a mere change of pace, and will return to her estimable form in future novels. Let's hope.

Kit Carson Front and Center in New Book

Newsday.com:

"Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, by Hampton Sides. Doubleday, 460 pp., $26.95.

"Kit Carson is as legendary in the annals of the American West as anyone not named William or George: only Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid and George Custer rank as high or higher in notoriety. Before he'd even gone to his grave, Carson became the original ideal of a pulp novel hero, and a silent movie was made about him as early as 1904. As happened so often in the West, legend quickly outran reality.

"In Hampton Sides' narrative history of Carson's exploits, 'Blood and Thunder,' one episode among many stands out for its weird, postmodern shadings. In 1849 a family of settlers and their servant were ambushed by Jicarilla Apaches on the Santa Fe Trail, and Carson, who lived nearby, joined the search party sent after them. He was an expert tracker, among the best of the white men ever to practice the art, and although the trail was the most difficult he would ever follow, the search party eventually came upon the natives. Carson wanted to rush the camp but was called back. His commander favored negotiation."

Pittsburgh's Black Culture Center Honors August Wilson

The Washington Post:

"In two years, the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh plans to move into a new facility to showcase its interdisciplinary approach to telling the story of African Americans.

"Founded in 2002 as the African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh, the museum changed its name this year to pay tribute to native son Wilson, whose dramas grew out of life in the city's black neighborhoods. The building campaign is going well; $27 million of the needed $36 million is in hand. But the money to develop programming and hire staff has been tough to raise.Yesterday Neil A. Barclay, the museum's president, said he was relaxing slightly.

"The Wilson Center was selected to receive one of the first Museum Grants for African American History and Culture, part of a new effort by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services to help African American museums with management, programming and operations."

Japanese WWII Internees Would Memorialize Bainbridge Island

Associated Press:

"Fumiko Hayashida is 95 now, but she remembers the day 64 years ago when she and her infant daughter, Natalie, were taken from their home at gunpoint and imprisoned under presidential order. The pair were among 227 Japanese-Americans forced from their homes on Bainbridge Island, Wash., on March 30, 1942, under order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"The men, women and children _ two-thirds of them U.S. citizens _ were marched to the Eagledale Ferry Dock, on their way to internment camps in Idaho and California. They were the first of what eventually became more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans imprisoned on the West Coast.

"On Wednesday, Hayashida _ described as the oldest living Bainbridge Island survivor _ appeared before a House committee to urge Congress to include the Bainbridge site in the national park system."

Book Alert / The Last Town on Earth

The Last Town on Earth -- A Novel by Thomas Mullen, Random House '06, $23.95, 394 pages, ISBN #978-1-4000-6520-8

After languishing on the unnoticed fringes of American history for decades, the influenza epidemic of 1918 has proliferated like a virus in recent years, with such nonfiction accounts as Gina Kolata's Flu and John Barry's The Great Influenza. Now, first novelist Thomas Mullen revisits that plague in the context of World War I, in a narrative that examines the issues of isolationism vs. patriotism, the early labor movement and utopian communities as they existed in the early 1900s in the life of the uninfected town of Commonwealth, WA.

Discussed in this provocative novel are President Wilson's evolution from antiwar president to marching the nation into conflict, the growth of the conscientious objector movement, the role of the American Protective League, which promoted national loyalty aggressively, and how Manifest Destiny impacted towns on the West Coast, such as Commonwealth.

Book Alert / The Observations

The Observations -- A Novel by Jane Harris, Viking '06, $24.95, 405 pages, ISBN #0670037737.

Fifteen-year-old Bessy Buckley has no means of support and little else going  for her in 1863 when she wanders into an Edinburgh manor and manages to sign on as a maid to the lady of the house. She knows she lacks the scullery skills required of a maid, but it turns out that her employer is more interested in Bessy's ability to read and write. She directs the new maid to keep a journal, listing each chore she did and recording her most intimate thoughts:

"So there I was with my two pens, my two titties, Charles Dickens, two slice of bread, and a blank book at the end of my first day in the middle of nowhere. Except as it turned out it wasn't quite the end."

The author clearly aims to add a luminous heroine to the body of literary fiction, and she may succeed, as Bessy sticks pins into the balloon of Victorian hypocrisy, with her naughty, tart tongue. Thickening the stew are secrets, tales of sordid pasts and disappearances. Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, calls The Observations "rollicking and engaging. A confident, fresh, roguishly charming first work."

Ivy Leaguers Flunk At History

San Francisco Chronicle:

"Seniors at the University of California-Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic knowledge of American history, government and politics in a new national survey, and students at Stanford University didn't do much better, getting a D. Out of 50 schools surveyed, Cal ranked 49th and Stanford 31st in how well they are increasing student knowledge about American history and civics between the freshman and senior years. And they're not alone among major universities in being fitted for a civics dunce cap.

"Other poor performers in the study were Yale, Duke, Brown and Cornell universities. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was the tail-ender behind Cal, ranking 50th. The No. 1 ranking went to unpretentious Rhodes College in Memphis.

"The study was conducted by the University of Connecticut's department of public policy and the nonprofit education organization Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Researchers sampled 14,000 students at 50 schools, large and small. The aim was to determine how well the colleges are teaching their students the basics of government, politics and history _ the bedrocks of good citizenship."