Four Books to Stuff Into Christmas Stockings

I wish to recommend the four best books that I have read in the past year.  Three are non-fiction, one is fiction.  I regret not having written full-length reviews of these books yet, but I may get around to it eventually.

By far my favorite book of 2010 has been Daniel Okrent's Last Call:  The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.  The title is self-explanatory but completely understates the rich lode of historical matter that Okrent has gathered between the book's covers.  I thought I knew the story of Prohibition, and I was wrong.  So many rich details had slipped my notice over the years, including the seminal work of Wayne B. Wheeler, the pre-eminent lobbyist for Prohibition, who basically invented grass-roots political organizing and direct-mail fundraising years before Marvin Liebman, Richard Viguerie, or MoveOn.org.

Neither did I know how the forces of Prohibition had undermined the Constitution by preventing for a full decade the mandated reapportionment following the 1920 census, because those favoring Prohibition knew that a Congress that more accurately represented cities, suburbs, and recent immigrants would be less inclined to support stiff enforcement of the Volstead Act and would be more inclined to move toward full repeal of the 18th Amendment.  As a result of the manipulation of Wheeler and others, the Congress elected in 1930 represented the same districts as their predecessors did in 1912, a clear violation of the Constitution.

What's more, Okrent did some digging and discovered no evidence for the widely-held belief that the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a bootlegger.  Though Kennedy had imported liquor legally at just about the time that repeal seemed inevitable, there simply is no documentary proof that he had imported illegal liquor during Prohibition.  The rumor that the senior Kennedy had been a bootlegger, and had built his family's fortune on that, seems to have begun sometime in the 1950s and, as Okrent points out, if any evidence had existed prior to that date, Kennedy -- who had many enemies in business and politics -- would certainly have been called out on it.

Another book of history that I really enjoyed was Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market:  Ayn Rand and the American Right.  Burns, who teaches at the University of Virginia, wrote a page-turner about the Objectivist philosopher and novelist's life.

That may be hard to believe, since the outlines of Rand's career are so well-known, given previous biographies and memoirs.  Somehow, however, Burns is able to keep the reader's attention.  As I read along through the book, I kept saying to myself, "I know what happens next, but I want to find out how it happens."

Burns was the first outside scholar to be given access to Rand's personal papers and library, and the result of her research is a highly readable yet informative chronicle, not only of Rand's life but of her influence on the American conservative and libertarian movements. 

Over the course of the past eleven or twelve months, I have had at least three opportunities to see Burns speak:  once at the Miller Center, once at the Virginia Festival of the Book, and once at a forum she assembled on the idea of "liberaltarianism," or the cooperation between libertarians and liberals in the public square.  On two occasions, I was able to interview her about Ayn Rand and about her book.

In the world of entertainment, it was my pleasure to see TV's Craig Ferguson perform his stand-up act at the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville on October 17.

In anticipation of that show, I read Ferguson's own autobiography, American on Purpose:  The Improbably Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot.

As the title implies, the story culminates in Ferguson's decision to become an American citizen.  I was actually a bit disappointed that, for all the detail about his life and "adventures" earlier in the book, the section on the naturalization process was thin.  It certainly was not as complete as the reports Ferguson gave about it on The Late, Late Show on CBS while he was going through it.  (That included numerous offers of "honorary citizenship" from state governors, including a then-unknown-outside-Alaska Sarah Palin, whom Ferguson described at the time as something of a "sexy librarian.")

Still, Ferguson's chronicle of his life growing up in a lower-middle-class household near Glasgow in the 1960s and '70s, his love affair with the United States that began upon his first visit here at the age of 13, his early life as a drunk and drug addict, his first attempts at performing (which began with him as the drummer for a punk rock band, leading to a stand-up act as the character "Bing Hitler") that included encounters with other beginners like U2 and Alan Cumming, through his long-term engagement as a regular on The Drew Carey Show and finally, his becoming the best of the late-night talk show hosts (in my opinion, at least).

After Ferguson's performance at the Paramount in Charlottesville, I noticed his tour bus was still parked out back and, curious, I found a cadre of fans standing outside, waiting for the star to emerge.  Sure enough, only a few minutes later, he came out of the stage door and signed a few autographs and posed for a few photographs.  Luckily for me and Steven Latimer, who was with me that night, Craig let us pose with him in the very last shot taken that night.  Naturally, I posted it on Facebook as soon as we got home.  It appears here for the first time outside a social networking context.

As the picture was being snapped, I said to Craig, "You're the smartest host on late-night TV," to which he replied:  "That's like being a tall midget."  Maybe so, but I stand by my statement.

For what it's worth, I also purchased Ferguson's novel, Between the Bridge and the River, on that night at the Paramount.  I have not yet had a chance to read it.

I don't read much fiction, in general, but when I received a review copy of James Magruder's Sugarless late last year, I simply could not put it down.

It has been almost a year since I read the book, but I still think about it because it resonates with my personal experience so much:  not in every aspect, but hitting a sufficient number of points on the matrix to make me believe it.

Sugarless is the story of Rick, a 15-year-old high school student in suburban Chicago during the mid-1970s who, almost purely by chance, ends up on the speech team and finds out he has a talent for dramatic interpretation (or dramatic interp, for those in the know).

Magruder's verisimilitude about high school forensics struck me more than anything else in the book, even the parts about the protaganist's struggle with coming out as gay in an era far less accepting of that than it is now.  His descriptions of the scenes at speech tournaments are amazingly accurate, and his portrayals of coaches and competitors are eerily familiar to me.

The one detail that other readers might find difficult to believe is the choice of the protaganist's speech coach to have him do an excerpt from Mart Crowley's play, The Boys in the Band.  People unfamiliar with high school forensics may think that a play about gay men would be off-limits, especially in 1976, and especially in the American Midwest.

The truth is, a cutting from The Boys in the Band was circulating at that time, and my own coach asked me to do it.  For reasons unrelated to the content of the piece, I ended up doing a different selection.  (If I recall correctly, it was the courtroom scene in A Man for All Seasons, a far more conventional choice.)  So I can testify against the doubters that an excerpt from The Boys in the Band was, indeed, being performed on the high school forensics circuit in the mid-1970s.

Having just seen the excellent documentary about Crowley and his play, Making the Boys, at the Virginia Film Festival, my memories of reading Sugarless earlier this year and my own experience in high school rushed back to me.  I recommend Sugarless to anyone who has competed in speech and debate or to anyone who was once a gay teenager.  It's an excellent book, and a compelling read -- a real achievement for a first-time novelist, even one who, like Magruder, is an accomplished playwright and translator.

(This review essay is excerpted from a longer blog post at Rick Sincere News & Thoughts on November 28, 2010.)

Book Notes 4

Continuing the “book notes” tradition begun during my tenure as books editor of terra nova, this review essay appeared in The Metro Herald of Alexandria, Virginia, on January 23, 2004. (There was no “Part II” published subsequent to this article.)

2003: BOOKS IN REVIEW – PART I


Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

The close of 2003 left us at The Metro Herald with a backlog of books that had landed on our review desk during the year. Although far too many books came our way for us to commission full-fledged reviews of each, we decided to clear the decks for 2004 by offering a number of capsule reviews, just enough to offer our readers a taste of what’s out there and available for purchase at their favorite bookshops or to borrow from their local libraries.

ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN LIFE

In City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, $30.00), Yale professor Douglas W. Rae expands upon the tradition of Jane Jacobs’ classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, draws from more recent research like Robert Putnam’s much-cited Bowling Alone. Using New Haven, Connecticut, as his main exhibit, Rae comprehensively examines the shortcomings of “urban renewal” programs, which have more often than not had a counterproductive (and counterintuitive) effect on the cities where they have been imposed. This book belongs on the shelf next to Jacobs’ books and Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist’s The Wealth of Cities (a personal favorite).



There is a hidden gem in Africa, a city-size museum in the unlikeliest place: the capital of Eritrea. In Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City (Merrell Publishers, $65.00), authors Edward Denison, Guang Ya Ren, and Naigzy Gebremedhin have produced a coffee table book that is far more than a collection of pretty pictures. Long an Italian colony before being occupied by neighboring Ethiopia after World War II, Eritrea became independent in 1991. During the colonial era, Italian architects used Asmara as a sort of blank canvas to practice modernism that was somewhat frowned upon under Mussolini’s fascist regime back home. (Socialists of all stripes prefer muscular, pragmatic, and traditional forms, particularly in public buildings.) As a result, Asmara is dotted with well-preserved modernist buildings that, had they been constructed in prewar Europe, might well have been destroyed in the calamity that was the Second World War. Instead, they were saved simply by their existence in a remote, dry, little-visited, seldom-remarked-upon outpost in the Horn of Africa. If the publication of this book does not double Eritrea’s tourism within a year or two, nothing can.

Across the Atlantic, near the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, another city, New Orleans, has preserved its own unique architecture. Architect Lloyd Vogt both wrote the text and created more than 150 line drawings in Historic Buildings of the French Quarter (Pelican Publishing, $23.95). Looking at the various streams of art and style that influenced New Orleans through settlers (and rulers) from France, Spain, the United States, and the Caribbean, Vogt finds the amazing architecture to be a parallel to Creole cuisine—a mixture that is greater, and more delectable, than the sum of its parts.

In any college community, there is some intersection of ‘town and gown.” In Charlottesville, that link with the University of Virginia is literally called “the Corner,” and author Coy Barefoot has, through keen research and affectionate dedication, given us a book of that name, The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia (Howell Press, $39.95). While the potential readership for such a book might seem limited—UVA students, alumni, faculty, and Charlottesvillians— anyone interested in urban growth and “local” history (in the broadest sense) will appreciate Barefoot’s work. Surely there are equivalents to “the Corner” in East Lansing, Amherst, Tuscaloosa, and dozens of other college towns—a comparative analysis of their development and their effect on urban life could be fascinating and informative, perhaps a topic for some bright historian’s doctoral dissertation.



ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Renowned photojournalist Bob Willoughby has produced a handsome coffee table book aimed at the film buff—The Star Makers: On Set with Hollywood’s Greatest Directors (Merrell Publishers, $49.95). With a bare minimum of text but overflowing with both color and black-and-white photographs, this book is also a quick-reference guide to the careers of such filmmakers as Orson Welles, George Cukor, and John Frankenheimer. Willoughby’s presence on location and in studio soundstages gives the whole enterprise a “You Are There” feeling. As Oscar®-winner Sydney Pollack notes in his foreword, Willoughby’s “understanding of the material he was photographing, coupled with his extraordinary technical skill and his instinct for sensing the right moments, has made his photographs extremely specific and powerful. As you look through them, there is an immediacy and an evocative power that is very, very specific to each of the films he is documenting.”

There is something oddly untimely about publishing a new book about Richard Rodgers in 2003. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a year late—the centenary of Rodgers’ birth (1902) was celebrated in 2002—or a year early—we commemorate the 25th anniversary of Rodgers’ death (in 1979) this year. Still, Geoffrey Block’s Richard Rodgers (Yale University Press, $32.50) is a welcome addition to the new raft of books exploring Broadway composers’ careers and works, rather than engaging in retrospective psychoanalysis of their lives. (In this, Block’s book on Rodgers has more in common with Stephen Banfield’s Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals than with, say, Meryle Secrest’s Stephen Sondheim: A Life.) That’s not to say that the book is bereft of personal information. Tidbits of that sort, including newly uncovered ones, are there— but only if they shed light on Rodgers’ life as an artist. There is no gossip for gossip’s sake.

Last fall, the Boston Red Sox came within inches of winning the pennant and, had they won the World Series, of repudiating the “Curse of the Bambino.” (The Yankees, of course, gave that Curse life for one more season.) Recently Pete Rose has admitted his gambling in hopes that he will be elected, as he deserves to be based on his performance on the diamond, to baseball’s Hall of Fame. Back in 1975, the Red Sox met Rose’s Cincinnati Reds in an unforgettable, seven-game World Series. In The Boys of October (Contemporary Books, $24.95), Doug Hornig explores (as his subtitle says) “how the 1975 Boston Red Sox embodied baseball’s ideals—and restored our spirits.” Hornig, a novelist as well as a writer of short- and book-length nonfiction, spent months tracing alumni of the ’75 Red Sox, interviewing them about that magical season and inquiring about their careers—and private lives—since then.



An amateur ballet company in Loudoun County, Virginia, is one of the foci of Jennifer Fisher’s Nutcracker Nation (Yale University Press, $27.00 ), which, as its subtitle explains, looks at How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World. Fisher, a dance historian and ethnologist, treats us to morsels of information about the history of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, beloved in America but largely snubbed in its native Russia. The Nutcracker is seen by more people in more audiences, it seems, than all other ballets performed in the United States in any given year. In fact, annual Nutcracker performances often are the cash cows for dance companies that lose money throughout the rest of the year; the Nutcracker underwrites their repertoires. Richly outfitted with a wide array of photographs, Nutcracker Nation also reminds us that this particular ballet has served as an introduction to dance for children and teenagers; as a result, it has featured such disparate and unexpected performers as Macaulay Culkin and Chelsea Clinton.

Kathleen E.R. Smith takes a colorful topic—the songs created to raise morale during World War II—and renders it mundane in God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War (University Press of Kentucky, $45.00). While the book is uneven, it still adds useful information (and an occasional insight) about wartime propaganda and in terms of social history, helping to answer the broad question, “What was it like on the home front during the War?,” within a specific sphere. Moreover, Smith indirectly provides a contrast to today’s music industry, in which a typical hit song is attached to a single artist, while in the 1940s, hits were recorded by several artists— singers, Big Bands, a cappella groups—and released simultaneously on different labels, often riding the charts side by side. One thing that could have enhanced this book immeasurably: an accompanying CD with recordings both of the well-known songs of the Second World War era (those that make us nostalgic) and of snippets from some of the more obscure songs, especially the early attempts at writing the anthem that would win the war (those that make us ask, “What were they thinking?”).

There is more to come as we review books on current affairs, history and biography, and miscellaneous topics.