Steve Goddard's History Wire

Obama and Clinton Channel The Late Sen. Paul Wellstone

The New Republic:

"Washington--If you want to talk about candidates borrowing from each other, consider how much Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are taking on loan from the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, the affable populist killed in a plane crash shortly before the 2002 election.

"I don't represent the big oil companies. I don't represent the big pharmaceutical companies," Wellstone said in the final television ad of his last campaign. "I don't represent the Enrons of this world. But you know what? They already have great representation in Washington. It's the rest of the people that need it. I represent the people of Minnesota."

And here's Hillary Clinton in a television ad run during the Wisconsin primary campaign: "The oil companies, the drug companies have had seven years of a president who stands up for them. It's time we had a president who stands up for all of you."

"As for Obama, he noted in Ohio this week that "year after year, politicians in Washington sign trade agreements that are riddled with perks for big corporations but have absolutely no protections for American workers. It's bad for our economy; it's bad for our country."

"Wellstone called for a trade policy that "doesn't just work for the multinationals, but also works for the environment, for safe food, for living wages; a trade policy that promotes democracy and the right to organize and bargain collectively."

                                                      (Click above link to read more)

Book Alert / The Zookeeper's Wife -- A War Story

The Zookeeper's Wife -- A War Story by Diane Ackerman, Norton '08, $24.95, 368 pages, ISBN #0393061728. Index, bibliography, details, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Will the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction narratives emerging from the memory of World War II ever end? In the latest, author Diane Ackerman tells a riveting tale of how some 300 Polish Jews were saved by Christian zookeepers, who hid them largely in the animal cages of the Warsaw Zoo.

Jan Zabinski and his wife Antonina are the heroes of this tale, which began in September of 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland, which amid widespread devastation, destroyed the Warsaw Zoo and most of the animals within it. Quietly, the zookeepers ran missions into the Jewish Ghetto, spiriting away refugees who came to stay in their villa and the adjacent animal enclosures. They gave their guests animal names to identify them.

"What with hidden people having animal names," writes Ackerman, "and pet animals having human names, and a badger sleeping on top of the piano, a muskrat trying to build its lodge in the stovepipe, and a fierce rabbit stealing meat off plates, it's no wonder that those who found refuge in the zoo called it 'The House Under A Crazy Star." Amazingly, the Zabinskis were able to shepherd all but two of the 300 guests safely through to the end of the war.

Book Alert / Send Yourself Roses

Send Yourself Roses -- Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles by Kathleen Turner in collaboration with Gloria Feldt, Springboard '07, $24.99, 265 pages, ISBN #0-446-58112-7. Notes, filmography, grouping of color glossy images.

Few love scenes in cinematic history have been seared into the minds of millions as that between Kathleen Turner and William Hurt in Body Heat. The word smoldering seems to have been invented for this tableau of over-the-top lust on an obviously sweltering night, as the sex-obsessed couple smashes every obstacle between them to make the point that congress has another meaning than that of a lawmaking body.

Turner would laugh out loud at the above characterization. In fact, she writes in her memoir, the scene was acted on a set so freezing that the actors had to be spritzed with a sprinkler to simulate perspiration. Such is the inside baseball Turner shares in this breezy account.

Body Heat put Turner on the map in 1981. In the nearly three decades since then, she's played Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, battled rheumatoid arthritis, crusaded for controversal causes, ended a 20-year marriage, and worked up close and personal with such screen legends as Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas, Steve Martin, Francis Ford Coppola, John Huston, Edward Albee and John Waters. As Turner enters the last decades of her life, what can we expect? Queen Victoria perhaps?

Fidel's Reign Ends Not With A Bang But With A Whimper

The New Yorker:

"And that it should end so ingloriously! No fighting to the last man at the battlements, no martyr’s surrender to an assassin’s bullet, only a creaking, shuffling exit through the ward’s doors, hospital gown flapping. We are less than a year away from the half-century marker of a most astonishing marathon, but even this artist of endurance must bow to fate and acknowledge that it’s time to go. Vámonos, Fidel: no one is standing in the way.

"So he leaves the field: Fidel Castro Ruz, son of a wealthy Spanish plantation owner and a Cuban washerwoman; rowdy street fighter and student leader; unstoppably audacious politician; revolutionary icon of the lordly profile; self-invented tropical socialist; epic enemy of the United States. In 1953, the extraordinary strength of his conviction persuaded more than a hundred men (and two women) to join him in an attack on one of the dictator Fulgencio Batista’s principal military garrisons. Nearly half his men died in the ill-fated attack and its aftermath; he escaped unharmed and emerged a hero.

"In December, 1956, following a period of imprisonment and exile, he led another improbable attack—this time by sea—against Batista. Again, he lost nearly all his men but survived, along with his kid brother, Raúl, and a scruffy Argentine named Ernesto Guevara. Washington had tired of the unsavory Batista, and it left the dictator to his enemies.

"On January 8, 1959, Fidel—in Cuba he would forever be known by his first name—entered Havana in triumph, promising Cubans an alternative to what had seemed their inescapable destiny as a Caribbean island. No more whoredom and ruffled cha-cha singers, no more death or blindness for want of simple prescription medicine, no more surrendering smiles for the tourist and the client, no more begging."

                                       (Click above  link to read more)

Book Alert / In the Blood

In The Blood -- A Memoir of My Childhood by Andrew Motion, Godine '07, $24.95, 326 pages, ISBN #1-56792-339-9.

In analyzing a patient, psychiatrists look for transformative events in one's life that mark a watershed; after that moment, nothing will ever be the same. For British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, that moment came in 1968 when his mother suffered a severe brain injury in a foxhunting accident.

"My childhood has ended suddenly," Motion wrote in the wake of that horrific injury. "I want to lock into my head everything that's happened in my life up to now, and make sure it never changes. If I can keep it safe, I'll be able to look back and feel safe myself....I just want everything as it was, when I saw the world for the first time."

Motion's passionate grasp for a world that was is seen as "a stand against the ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been 'felt in the blood and felt along the heart' is, as the epigraph from Wordsworth suggests, an integral tissue of our anatomy, a part that can be neither taken from us nor lost." Motion is the author of ten books of poetry and five of prose.

Long-Time Lovers of Chevy Camaros, Feast Your Eyes

The Los Angeles Times:

Car buffs have their to-die-for models. In the Chevy family, Camaros have attracted millions of fans over the year. For those die-hards, The Los Angeles Times has gathered an archive of notable Camaros over the past half-century.

So Many Support Obama, But Some Worry: Will He Be Safe?

The New York Times:

"Dallas — There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?

"In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Mr. Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence. 'I’ve got the best protection in the world,' Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. 'So stop worrying.'

"Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months.

Mr. Obama was 6 at the time, and like many of his admirers, he has only read about the violence that traumatized the nation. But those recollections and images are often invoked by older voters, who watch his candidacy with fascination, as well as an uneasy air of apprehension, as Democrats inch closer to selecting their nominee."

                                                        (Click above link to read more)

Book Alert / On Deep History and the Brain

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail, UCal Press '07, 271 pages, ISBN #0520252896. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustated.

We knit our brows wondering whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it. Now Harvard history Prof. David Lord Smail asks whether historic events actually took place if there was nobody alive to write about them. And his answer is a resounding "yes!"

Our forefathers felt so secure in considering the Garden of Eden the foundation stone for history. But then scientists had to muck things up in the 19th century by introducing such concepts as evolution and paleontology. So stuff actually happened with no homo sapiens around? How can there have been a sunny, breezy summer day at the shore without anyone basking beside it in a beach chair, writing down what it looked like?

Smail writes of the human conceit that historians insist on characterizing the period before humans arrived as "prehistory," whose abandonment "would postulate continuity between the biological descent of hominids and the 'ascent of civilization' of the abstract 'mankind' of humanistic historical writing. Prehistory is the buffer zone."

He goes on to argue, "A deep history of humankind is any history that straddles this buffer zone, bundling the Paleolithic and the Neolithic together with the Postlithic -- that is, with everything that has happened since the emergence of metal technology, writing, and cities some 5,500 years ago. The result is a seamless narrative that acknowledges the full chronology of the human past."

Book Alert / Miscarriage of Justice

Miscarriage of Justice -- A Novel by Kip Gayden, Center Street '08, $22.99, 330 pages, ISBN #159995687X.

It's not surprising that Kip Gayden would stage the climax of his first novel in a courtroom. After all, he's a judge of the First Circuit Court in Nashville, TN. But, for his sake, we hope the events leading up to the murder trial are out of his ken.

As Gayden explains it, a yellowed headline from the March 6, 1913 edition of the Nashville Tennessean -- "WOMAN....SUFFRAGE....SENSATIONAL KILLING" piqued his interest and led him on a quest to learn how a handsome interloper upends the contented life of a doctor and his family and leads the doctor's wife into an act of betrayal. "The only thing more surprising than the crime itself," says Gayden's publisher, "is the verdict." Don't e-mail us for the answer; we'll never tell.

Book Alert / Knowing Dickens

Knowing Dickens by Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Cornell UP '07, 238 pages, ISBN #0801446147. Index, works cites, bibliographical notes.

The human unconscious mind and its interplay with consciousness was a hot topic in 19th century Victorian life. In this fascinating book, Boston College English Prof. Rosemarie Bodenheimer puts Charles Dickens on her couch to analyze how he integrated his deep personal interest in the unconscious with his writing and invested some of his most memorable characters with traits and behaviors that caught his interest.

"Charles Dickens was extremely sensitive to criticism," the author writes. "Even the slightest suggestion of under-appreciation could spark one of Dickens's brilliantly self-justifying, indignant letters and conversations, which seemed to come from an unstoppable force within him. His portraits of self-defensive talkers like Mr. Micawber, Harold Skimpole, or Mr. Dorrit show just how cannily he could analyze and parody the strategies of denial that both he and his characters used to make themselves unassailable."

Or consider Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, whom Dickens often placed "in a twilight state between sleeping and waking, when they could know things without being conscious of what they know." Bodenheimer describes how Dickens practiced hypnosis on friends and family to tease out the boundary between conscious and unconscious and derived satisfaction from acting in amateur theatricals that "allowed him to express passions that he ordinarily kept under wraps."

A searing experience for the British author was visiting Philadelphia's Eastern Penitentiary during his 1842 tour of America, where he was horrified by the effects of solitary confinement on a prisoner. "Characters like Miss Havisham or Mrs. Clennam, who isolate themselves in their houses," write the author, "express Dickens's fear of the crippling mental paralysis that he associated with confinement in one space."