Steve Goddard's History Wire

Spring Break!

As our readers may have guessed by now, History Wire has taken leave for a little fun in the sun! We return on Monday.

Steve

 

Book Alert / Rawhide Down

Rawhide Down -- The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan by Del Quentin Wilber, Holt '11, 305 pages, ISBN #080509346X. Index, bibliography, notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

I was dismayed in reading the first chapter or two of this seductively-named book because it appeared to be simply an adoring profile of President Ronald Reagan. But I came to realize that this journalist's book is less about Reagan than about the inner workings of the Secret Service and the trauma unit of a busy hospital, and on those topics it is nothing less than riveting.

Most of us recall what happened that day 30 years ago, from the morning to night network coverage of the shooting that nearly took the President's life. But Wilber gives his readers a minute-by-minute account of the events leading to the tragedy, with sections describing Reagan's day prior to the shooting, alternating with sections about assassin John Hinckley.

Reagan's calm humor exhibited at George Washington Hospital has been oft told, but wife Nancy's shock and obsessive need to be near her possibly-dying husband is less well known. Nancy Reagan had no "handlers" in the political sense. She kept demanding that she get out of the limousine taking her to the hospital once it encountered traffic, and one has an image of her escaping from the car and running down the street to the nearby hospital.

All the while, the Secret Service had no idea whether this was an isolated shooting or was part of an international conspiracy. The idea of letting Reagan's headstrong spouse escape from the car was unthinkable, but how does a Secret Service agent tackle the first lady of the land?

All in all, Wilber's book is skillfully told, and one learns rafts about the Secret Service and the inner workings, both medical and political, of the trauma center of an urban hospital. It is well worth the read. Del Quentin Wilber has reported for The Washington Post for many years, primarily in law enforcement and security issues.

The Book of Mormon on Broadway -- Is It Really That Controversial?

Time.com:

"The Book of Mormon, the new musical from South Park's creators, opens on Broadway tonight at a theater named for a playwright who had a somewhat more tragic outlook on life than Trey Parker and Matt Stone. (When the two appeared on his show a few weeks ago, David Letterman joked, 'I think I just heard Eugene O'Neill turn over in his grave').

"Previews of the show about young Mormon missionaries sent to Uganda began last month, but it's been in the works for some seven years. And as TIME's Richard Zoglin recently wrote, the arrival on the Great White Way of 'the bad boys behind TV's most notoriously potty mouthed cartoon show … shouldn't be all that surprising.'

"Broadway is more eclectic these days (think puppet musical Avenue Q, whose Robert Lopez is a co-creator of Mormon), and hey, these guys just happen to love song and dance. 'The highest thing we were going for, and this sounds kind of corny,' Stone told TIME, 'but we wanted to do a traditional Broadway musical.' One of the duo's early projects was the film Cannibal! The Musical. NewsFeed hasn't seen it, but we're guessing it's not exactly Sweeney Todd. We do however, have a fondness for 'Blame Canada,' the Oscar nominated song from the South Park movie."

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Reliving History: October 19, 1987

Newsweek.com:

"The Bush family was furious about this NEWSWEEK profile, which ran the week George H.W. Bush announced his candidacy for president. And who could blame them? The cover line suggested that the then–vice president was a wimp—a strange charge about a man who narrowly escaped a strafed Navy bomber in World War II and took a daring little-noticed trip to meet with gun-toting Salvadoran military commanders during the Reagan years.

"Barbara Bush placed a furious call to her son, future president George W., who had vetted journalist  Margaret Garrard Warner. 'Have you seen NEWSWEEK?' Barbara Bush growled, according to her son’s recent memoir, Decision Points. 'I quickly tracked down a copy and was greeted by the screaming headline: ‘Fighting the Wimp Factor,’  Bush 43 wrote. 'I was red hot.

"I got Margaret on the phone. I . . . told her I thought it was part of a political ambush. She muttered something about her editors being responsible for the cover. I did not mutter. I railed about editors and hung up. From then on, I was suspicious of political journalists and their unseen editors.' A year later, owner Katharine Graham made peace with the Bushes, although 'the issue never really died down,' Graham wrote in her book Personal History."

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Why Are We So Obsessed With Victorian Sexuality?

Slate.com:

                                                BY MICHAEL LEVENSON

"I haven't had sex since starting Deborah Lutz's book, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. Now that I've finished, I'm still in recovery. It's only fair, you say, to look for other causes, but, I'm sorry, the correlation is too strong. These interwoven tales of Victorian high jinks include some piquant stories: Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up his poems from his wife's grave, Algernon Swinburne scurrying off to be 'birched' by prostitutes near Regent's Park, Richard Burton (the explorer) trying to wake the British out of their sexless sleep. But there's a problem. Here's a representative passage.

"Wilde took the sexual radicalism of the Aesthetes and Cannibals and propelled it even further, making it more perilous, more blatantly illegal, and more—as it would be called in the twentieth century—gay. The movement had always flirted with male-male sexuality. There were Burton's writings on sodomy (and sapphism). Morris and Rossetti loved their collaborations with men. Swinburne, throughout the 1860s, seemed to have sodomy always on his mind."

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In Memoriam: Elizabeth Taylor

The New Yorker:

"I’m saddened to learn that Elizabeth Taylor has died, shocked to note that she was seventy-nine. Was she only eighteen when she appeared in Vincente Minnelli’s 'Father of the Bride,' nineteen in 'A Place in the Sun,' and twenty-six for 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof''? She grew up too fast (she was already a star in 'National Velvet,' at twelve), lived too much too soon, and was a victim of tabloid sensationalism and of changing times, in the movie business and in the world.

"She was a jazz-forged performer in an industry whose norms and ways were falling before the new styles of the almighty teen; she was a hot performer, one of the most ferociously intense, in an era that turned McLuhan-esque cool; she needed Douglas Sirk to transfigure the melodramatic excesses from camp into symbol, but he left Hollywood in 1959. She shared the fate of premature obsolescence with many of the great jazz musicians of her time.

"Ezra Goodman, in his superb collection 'The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood,' charts in detail the fan-magazine smears that Taylor endured after Eddie Fisher left Debbie Reynolds and married her, in 1959. (Reynolds was a teen favorite.) The invective rivals any that could be found in today’s on-line snark-fests. Here’s Joseph Mankiewicz, who directed her twice (in 'Suddenly, Last Summer' and, of course, 'Cleopatra'), interviewed by Gary Carey in 1972 (it’s in a book of interviews with Mankiewicz edited by Brian Dauth):

 

"For a while, her personal tribulations seemed to have become interwoven with her work; how could they not have? When all at once her public image ceased being that of an actress—and became, instead, a sitting-duck target with unlimited free shots for all comers?

"Was she born too late—or too soon for the age of unbounded convergence between media image and screen persona, the age we’re living in now?"

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Will Lincoln Bargain Away Fort Sumter?

The New York Times:

                                     DISUNION: FOLLOWING THE CIVIL WAR

                                                         AS IT UNFOLDED                                           

  BY JAMIE MALANOWSKI

March 16 – 23, 1861

"Faced with unpalatable recommendations from his civilian and military advisers alike, but braced by the stirring advocacy of Blairs pere et fils, and intrigued by the can-do spirit of the relatively young Gus Fox, Abraham Lincoln this week . . . stalled for time.

"The more the president pondered, the more he wanted to know. What really is the supply situation in Fort Sumter? How formidable are the armaments arrayed against the fort? Despite Charleston’s fervor for secession, is there a residual feeling for the union that can be quickened to life? Sumter may be more easily resupplied than his superannuated advisers believe, and yet Lincoln might conclude that an accommodationist posture might serve him better in the long run. Paris was worth a mass, Henry of Navarre trenchantly concluded; Virginia may well be worth a fort."

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Book Review: At the Fights -- American Writers on Boxing

The Los Angeles Times:

"Edited by George Kimball & John Schulian, Library of America: 517 pp., $35

"Part freak show, part sitcom, part mortal combat — ah, yes, behold the world of professional prizefighting, the face-break social network, an ultraviolent art and craft that to some is more subhuman than true sport. Or, as a fictional character unlocked by a key to Rod Serling's imagination once put it, ever so luridly: 'Sport? Are you kiddin'? If there was headroom, they'd hold these things in sewers.'

"Oh, I miss it so.

"Not the splatter of plasma and phlegm that would fleck any of us occupying a chair at ringside. Not the leaky eyesocket in one corner or the oozing nostril in the other, undergoing triage by Q-tip. Not any of those kidney-killing, lip-collagening, mind-blowing blows. What I do miss are the rock-'em, sock-'em combatants themselves, the lunks, the punks, the greats, the galoots, the ones with 'Jersey Shore' abs and the ones with 'Biggest Loser" flab, bless their endangered hearts."

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FOCUS: A Potpourri -- Impure Worlds / The Campaigns of Alexander

Impure Worlds -- The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel by Jonathan Arac, Fordham UP '11 paperback. 210 pages, ISBN #0823231798. Index, notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

"A preference for impurity and a search for how to analyze and explain it," writes author Jonathan Arac, "are guiding threads in this book, as its chapters pursue the complex entanglements of culture, politics, and society from which great literature arises." While he focuses on the 19th century novel, Arac asserts that he includes a broader range of writers as well, "in a textured, contoured, discontinuous history." Sample chapter headings include "The Impact of Shakespeare: Goethe to Melville" and "The Birth of Huck's Nation." Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of many other books.

The Landmark Arrian -- The Campaigns of Alexander, Edited by James Romm, Series Editor Robert B. Strassler, a new translation by Pamela Mensch, introduction by Paul Cartledge. Pantheon '10, $40, 503 pages, ISBN #037542346X. Reference maps, index, ancient sources, bibliography, chronology, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Few factors loom as large in writing history as the author's perspective. So in tackling Alexander's dozen years spent in continuous military campaigns, it is of enormous importance that the historian Arrian had served as a high Roman official with command of an army, giving him "a level of understanding that only firsthand military experience can provide." And the format of this new edition is equal to the challenge of the narrative, with dozens of tinted maps, supplementing a text that is richly illustrated and annotated. Translator Pamela Mensch coalesces some of the pre-eminent scholars at work today to create a landmark work. Author James Romm teaches the classics at Bard College and has written a number of books. Robert B. Strassler is an unaffiliated scholar with a doctorate from Bard College.

The 180-Year Itch, Metaphysically Speaking

The New York Times:

"A suspicion lingers in the heart of the constant theatergoer that if you are too clever, then you must be made of ice. This prejudice has misguidedly dogged, among others, that greatest of songwriters, Stephen Sondheim, like a peevish, affection-starved beagle. But it has never clung to anyone more tenaciously and erroneously than it does to the playwright Tom Stoppard.

"So I encourage you to feel the heat rising from the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where a half-terrific revival of Mr. Stoppard’s entirely terrific 'Arcadia”' opened on Thursday night. Though this play finds Mr. Stoppard at his most luxuriantly wordy, it is not hot air of which I speak. Watching David Leveaux’s production I realized more than ever that 'Arcadia,' a tale of two centuries in pseudopastoral England, is propelled by genuine, panting passion.

"And not just physical passion. This may be a work that begins with the question, posed by a 13-year-old girl in 1809, of just what 'a carnal embrace' is. But good old lust is only one complicating element within the deeper impulse that animates both the characters in 'Arcadia' and the play itself."

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