Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / The Associates

The Associates -- Four Capitalists Who Created California by Richard Rayner, Norton '08, $23.95, 223 pages, ISBN #0393059138. Index, bibliographical note, source notes, unillustrated.

Author Richard Rayner sums up his new book better than a reviewer could:

"It's a legendary story, a central part of the American West's creation myth, and it's been told many different ways: as a kind of triumph of will, guts, and the American can-do spirit  over unimaginable difficulty and danger; as a tragedy, involving the virtual extermination of Native American cultures and the vast herds of buffalo that sustained them; as a race, between the Irish navies of the Union Pacific, laying track from the east, and the Chinese coolies of the Central Pacific, advancing from the west. All these versions have some validity. But really it's a story about cash, about rapacity. The railroad was built -- built, as opposed to dreamed of and talked about -- by men who cared only about money and were absolutely ruthless about money."

The story of the golden spike driven into the ground at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, completing construction of America's first transcontinental railroad, is better known than that of how it came to be. Rayner describes how four Sacramento, CA shopkeepers -- Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington -- joined forces to build the railroad but whose animating force wasn't social or economic progress but the search for money, money and more money.

It is curious that, in subtitling his book Four Capitalists Who Created California, Rayner gives such short shrift to Huntington's nephew Henry, characterizing him briefly as having used his inherited wealth to collect books and art. The real story is far more interesting and significant for California. Collis left his fortune to his young widow, Arabella, and his nephew (he had no children), who soon married and pooled their $100 million fortune (multiple billions today) into land development in Southern California, increasing land values by building interurban lines out to it, and then selling the enhanced land at huge profits.

Because of the huge footprint the Huntingtons were able to impress on greater Los Angeles, they created the urban sprawl for which Southern California is best known.  And with their other hand, they built the massive collection contained in the Huntington Library today. In short, no history of the structural creation of California is complete without major attention being given to Henry Huntington. Rayner is the author of two books of nonfiction and five novels.

Hilton Sisters And Boleyn Sisters: Any Parallels?

The New York Times:

"More slog than romp, 'The Other Boleyn Girl' tells the salacious story of two hot blue bloods who ran amok and partly unclothed in the court of Henry VIII. Best known for losing her head to the king, first metaphorically, then literally, Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman, saucy), along with her sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson, sedate), entered the court of the king (Eric Bana, brooding and glowering) when he was still wed to Catherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent). A man of considerable and changeable appetites, the king yearned for a male heir and anything in a frock who wasn’t the queen. His sexual wish was their command."

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Historic Preservation: Saving A Denny's (dare we call it, restaurant?)

Newsweek:

"Stephen Lee is not accustomed to being the center of attention. He heads the Seattle Landmark Preservation Board, an 11-member commission that typically receives three or four requests every two weeks to decide whether or not a particular building is worthy of landmark designation. His meetings usually attract a handful of attendees, if that many.

"But when Lee and his board met for a routine meeting last week, four television crews, reporters from all the local papers and more than 100 community members joined them. The property to be considered: a shutdown Denny's restaurant in the city's Ballard neighborhood. 'It was wild,' says Lee, who describes the Wednesday night meeting as 'the most excitement' he has seen during his six years chairing the board.

"The crowd stuck around for two and a half hours to get the verdict: by a 6 to 3 vote, Seattle declared the former Denny's, built in 1964, a historical landmark, citing its importance as a local signpost; its swooping, Googie-style roof made it a distinctive marker of the neighborhood. 'I truly think that it has a distinctive enough element in the community and its urban fabric that it should not be lost,' says Lee, who voted in favor of saving the building. As a result, a lot of people are asking him, 'What are you doing saving a Denny's?'"

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Book Alert / History of the Florentine People

History of the Florentine People, Volume 3, Books IX-XII, Memoirs, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard UP '07, 477 pages, ISBN #0-674-01682-3. Cumulative index, index to archival sources, bibliography, notes to the translation, notes to the text.

Leonardo Bruni isn't the first historian to race the clock. Poor William Manchester ran out of gas midway through the third volume of his trilogy on Winston Churchill a decade ago and had to hand it off to some raw recruit to finish the job. For his part, Bruni didn't anticipate when he began his history of the Florentine people in 1415 that it would take nearly 30 years ago complete.

As the editor tells us, Bruni expected his 12-book history to concentrate on contempory events, ending perhaps with the capture of Pisa in 1406. But he didn't anticipate being named chancellor of Florence in 1427, a post he held for 17 years. Organization and reorganization of a staggering amount of material took time, and at one point, Bruni found himself short of reliable sources.

But when all was said and done, the editors write, "Bruni became the first historian in the Western tradition to compose a history based extensively on sources in government archives" and, in so doing, to become the bestselling author of the 15th century. Bruni's own Memoirs complete this third and final volume of his history. Latin scholars will appreciate the book's format, with a page of the original Latin facing its English translation. Separate sets of notes relate to the text and the translation.

Book Alert / My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead -- Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro, Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, Harper '08, $24.95, 587 pages, ISBN #0061240370.

"A love story can never be about full possession...." writes Jeffrey Eugenides. "Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name....It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstacy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer."

Such is the lush introduction to a couple of dozen love stories -- some classics, some not -- most penned by writers you'll know: Anton Chekhov's "The Lady With The Little Dog," William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Vladimir Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta," Isaac Babel's "First Love," Richard Ford's "Fireworks," and Bernard Malamud's "The Magic Barrel," among them.

How Would You Like A Hair Sandwich?

Slate.com:

                                                                 BY JOE KEOHANE

"Like all good stories, this one begins with a bull humping a cow in the middle of the road. In 1957, Alan Abel, a lecturer and jazz drummer who occasionally went by the name 'Professor Paradiddle,' was on his way to a performance in Denton, Texas, when he found himself caught in a traffic jam caused by the aforementioned beasts. 'My father sat there studying the appalled expressions on the faces of the other motorists,' recalls Abel's daughter Jenny. 'He suddenly had an idea.'

"The idea was to write a satire about a group called 'The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals,' or SINA, which would call for animals to be clothed for the sake of decency. Abel submitted his story to the Saturday Evening Post, but when the editors missed the joke and angrily rejected it, he got an even better idea and founded SINA for real in 1959. The agenda: to get Bermuda shorts on horses, dogs, and any animal taller than 4 inches or longer than 6. The battle cry: 'A nude horse is a rude horse!'

"Thus was launched the career of America's greatest living hoaxer. Abel's story is chronicled in Abel Raises Cain, a documentary directed by Jenny Abel and Jeff Hockett and now available on DVD. The filmmakers have been tirelessly promoting the film along the festival circuit and recently inked a deal with a Canadian distributor. They're still self-distributing in the United States."

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William F. Buckley, Jr. Dies -- Father Of Conservatism And So Much More

The New York Times:

"William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.

'Mr. Buckley suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. 'He might have been working on a column,' Mr. Buckley said.

"William Buckley, with his winningly capricious personality, his use of ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare to an anteater’s, was the popular host of one of television’s longest-running programs, 'Firing Line,' and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine 'National Review.' He also found time to write more than 50 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to dissertations on harpsichord fingering to celebrations of his own dashing daily life. He edited at least five more."

The Times also offers a photo archive of Buckley's life.

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Book Alert / Our Holocaust

Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund, Toby Press '06, $24.95, 407 pages, ISBN #1-59264-139-3.

Writing about a family struggling to survive during the Holocaust, the author writes that the disappearance of family members as a result of the Nazi purge caused relationships to be governed by what he calls the "Law of Compression," in which "tenuous connections turned friends into uncles, cousins and grandparents." Here's a sample of Gutfreund's graceful writing:

"Grandpa used to say, 'People have to die of something,' and refused to donate to the war against cancer, the war against traffic accidents, or any other war. To avoid being considered stingy, he would occasionally burst into exemplary displays of tremendous generosity. He put on these shows with such proficiency that if not for us, his relatives, no one would have known the simple truth: He was a miser.

"In his home, parsimony was the law of the land. he zealously collected empty bottles for their deposits, and when one of them broke he glued it back together with great artistry. Like a cuckoo, he tossed his shirts into other people's laundry hampers, staging stains when necessary. He had a wonderful ability to catch colds in tandem with us, so he could take our cough syrup and conserve his own. He declared the colds over prematurely, proclaiming, 'We're better now!' and stockpiled the remaining antibiotics. He kept a bottle of liquid soap in his bathroom, and whenever the soap level dropped below a finger's width he watered it down in an endless process that ultimately produced a bottle of water convinced it was soap. We were happy, at times, to remind ourselves that he wasn't even our real grandfather."

This is the first novel for Gutfreund, who was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1963 and lives in the Galilee.

Book Alert / The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams

The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. II -- 1945-1957, Edited by Albert J. Devlin, Co-Edited by Nancy M. Tischler, New Directions '04, $39.95, 662 pages, ISBN #0-8112-1600-4. General index, index of recipients, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Those of us with literary agents could well feel guilt at our neglect of them after thumbing through this volume of Tennessee Williams's letters, written between the ages of 34 and 46. Of the 350 letters reprinted here, no one received more than Audrey Wood, who represented him for 32 years, and his grandfather, Walter Edwin Dakin, his chief link to his family now that he was estranged from his parents for allowing his schizophrenic sister Rose to be lobotomized.

Audrey Wood had helped put him on the map with the publication of The Glass Menagerie in 1944, and the Tennessee we witness in these early letters reflect the self-consciousness of the newly rich, anxious to befriend those dear to him with his new resources but stumbling a bit in the execution of his generosity.

In 1939, Williams had his first name changed from Thomas to Tennessee, and his grandfather is the only correspondent for whom he signed his letters "Tom." One wishes that the editors had chosen to include notable letters to Williams as well as from him. Williams makes no attempt to conceal his affection for Audrey Wood, whom he addressed in one letter as "Dear Child of God."

Other notables to whom Williams wrote during these years include New York Times theatre reviewer Brooks Atkinson, Actresses Katharine Cornell, Anna Magnani, Jessica Tandy, and Helen Hayes, and director/producer Elia Kazan. His correspondence gives the lie to the notion that gifted playwrights simply lie back and bask in the glory of fame. Dozens of letters to theater reviewers at loads of different papers confirm that any successful playwright must devote himself assiduously to the care and feeding of the media.

The editors are English professors -- Albert J. Devlin at the University of Missouri and Nancy M. Tischler at Penn State.

Magazine Offers Excerpt From New Elizabeth Cady Stanton Biography

American Heritage:

In Chapter Four of her new book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich describes Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s awakening as a young civil rights activist and gives context to her struggle. Stanton, who was one of the most outspoken advocates for women’s rights in the 19th century, identified strongly with those trapped by the institution of slavery.

From Chapter Four: Slaves in the Attic

On a bright autumn day in 1839, Elizabeth Cady and her sisters were singing in the parlor of the large country house owned by their cousin, the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Suddenly, Smith walked in and with a mysterious air summoned them to the top of the house. Pledging them to secrecy, he opened the door to a little-used room. There sat a beautiful young woman—a runaway slave.

“Harriet,” Smith said, “I have brought all my young cousins to see you. I want you to make good abolitionists of them by telling them the history of your life—what you have seen and suffered in slavery.” For the next two hours the girls listened, weeping, as Harriet told of being sold for her beauty in a New Orleans market. The details were too horrible to repeat, except in whispers."

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