Category Archives: Book Reports

APRIL BOOK REPORT–O.J. SIMPSON, ALAS and ROCK FROM THE BEGINNING (4/13)

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American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense (Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth, 1996) and Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away with Murder (Vincent Bugliosi, 1996)

I actually ended up reading these side by side–a few chapters of one then a few of the other–because a couple of hundred pages into Shiller’s massive tome, I felt the need for an antidote. The way Schiller saw it from the inside, O.J. Simpson’s defense attorneys–not to mention Simpson himself–were precisely the slick pieces of central-casting crapola they seemed at the time. Whatever Bugliosi is–and I find it hard to have a completely positive view of anyone so convinced of his own righteousness and general superiority to the rest of humankind–he isn’t slick.

Anyway, this is the first month of my life I’ve devoted to the Trial of the (Last) Century and rest assured it will be the last. Of the two, I would probably actually recommend Schiller’s book. Bugliosi makes his main points in about fifty pages worth of real argument scattered here and there throughout a book that (when footnotes and appendices are included) stretches well over four hundred. Beyond that you end up reading a lot about how much smarter Vince is than the rest of us poor incompetents and wishing he had chosen to transport some of that erudition through his typewriter or expend it on something other than the prosecution’s generally mind-boggling incompetence (viable as that point is, it does wear thin after a bit). Guy put the Manson family away so I cut him a lot of slack, but he’s pushing the limits of a commoner’s patience here.

As for the Schiller version…well, to be fair, he came up with an interesting angle.

With Simpson’s guilt in little doubt, the verdict already well-known to all at the time of publication, and little to be gained by heading in Bugliosi’s direction of excoriating a team of prosecutors evidently grown so fat and lazy on the high conviction rates guaranteed by a system that routinely stomps those who can’t afford “dream teams” into the ground that they couldn’t get out of their own way, he decided to make his 700 page opus about the souls of the lawyers!

On the surface this might seem, er, implausible as a subject of interest in a case where the defense team’s highest moment was the inspired decision to replace pictures of Simpson’s nude girlfriend with a picture of a Norman Rockwell print of a young black girl overcoming segregation on the occasion of the jury’s visit to Simpson’s home.

Don’t laugh, though.

It kind of works. Schiller’s real protagonist–who would be completely forgotten now if not for the strange, source less, perfect-in-its-disturbing-way celebrity of his insidious offspring–is Robert Kardashian. Mostly this is because the now deceased Kardashian was the guy who drew him into the case as the kind of “journalist” who could help shepherd the defense through the technical difficulties of transcribing Mark Fuhrman’s infamous, game-changing tapes (a “favor,” designed to increase trust and access for the improvement and/or existence of this very book, a service which one LAPD detective attached to the case deemed crucial to the single most important element in setting Simpson free, though one could, of course, argue that Fuhrman’s own vileness was more important still), all while believing fervently in Simpson’s guilt.

Certain kinds of journalists are, like certain kinds of lawyers, a special breed.

In any case, Schiller stumbled onto the one really interesting angle. Namely, what did Kardashian–the only lawyer in the case who was genuinely close to Simpson either before or during the trial, the only one who had a material role in Simpson’s cover-up, the only one who renewed his license to practice criminal law so that he specifically could not be called to testify about that role, and, oddly, the only one who seemed to possess anything a normal person might recognize as resembling a conscience–know and when did he know it. And Schiller the journalist milks this for all it’s worth, right down to never letting us know the answer but giving us all the information we need to make an educated guess.

Like I say, not a place I ever care to go again, but together, these two books certainly tell any moderately interested person everything they will ever need to know about this particular bit of madness.

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, aka Rock From the Beginning (Nik Cohn, 1970, revised 1973)

A re-read.

Whoo boy.

One of the first “histories” of rock and roll. On the surface Cohn is pretty much a constant fingernail on the chalkboard of my particular sensibility. Whatever I like least in a smart-ass he tends to represent in spades:

Desire to be at least as important as his subject? Check.

Not too keen on the facts, especially if they interfere with his own reality? Check.

Literary pretensions sans literary discipline and training? Check. (He got past Tom Wolfe on talent alone, but I suspect he was aiming for the D.H. Lawrence of Studies in Classic American Literature at the very least, even if no torture has ever been devised that would make him admit it.)

Dismissive of anything he doesn’t like but weirdly (by which I mean, not quite sincerely) apologetic about what he does like? Check.

Hipper than thou, even when (or especially when) he’s pretending to anti-hipness? Check. 

Professional huckster? You bet! (His other main claim to fame is writing the story for New York Magazine upon which Saturday Night Fever became based. Turned out he made it up. Of course he did.)

Women problems? The rock critic’s ever-abiding occupational hazard–or perhaps job requirement?

Check and double-check.

I mean this is a guy who, privileged with a sharp brain and a front row seat–make that a Front Row Seat!–to the madness of the sixties, makes it very clear that the only two things which truly frightened and disoriented him were Brenda Lee’s pipes and Tina Turner’s butt.

Admittedly, two cosmic forces, but still….

So, with all that going against him, why is this still an essential read?

Well, for one thing he could write. Boy could he write.

Among English language critics who have covered the arts in the last hundred years, he and Lester Bangs are the only ones who I would ever recommend reading for style. Whether there is any significance to the two men being so close in age and both covering rock and roll–at least in those days, the red-headed stepchild of “the arts”–is a discussion best left to shrinks and sociologists. And I don’t mean to really compare the two. I mean, Bangs is what Cohn might have been if he hadn’t been a huckster.

All that said, he was often insightful in spite of himself and his commentary on the London scene from which he sprang is probably unparalleled, (and he was particularly good–not to mention almost eerily prescient–on both the Beatles and the Stones, not a bad trick for 1970, when seeing them clearly could not have been easy).

And believe me, for this sort of description, I can easily put up with having every single one of my buttons frequently and fervently pushed:

“I remember seeing them [Ike and Tina Turner] in a London Club one time and I was standing right under the stage. So Tina started whirling and pounding and screaming, melting by the minute, and suddenly she came thundering down on me like an avalanche, backside first, all that flesh shaking and leaping in my face. And I reared back in self-defence, all the front rows did, and then someone fell over and we all immediately collapsed in a heap, struggling and cursing, thrashing about like fish in a bucket.

“When I looked back up again, Tina was still shaking above us, her butt was still exploding, and she looked down on us in triumph. So sassy, so smug and evil. She’d used her arse as a bowling ball, us as skittles, and she’d scored a strike.”

Forget Tom Wolfe, even D.H. Lawrence himself never beat that.

MARCH BOOK REPORT (3/13)

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The Instant Enemy (Ross MacDonald, 1968)

A re-read. Late period MacDonald, the first of the “He’s-better-than-Hammett-and-Chandler!” hard-boiled writers and still the only one I know of who very nearly was. This was in his high-middle range and very good indeed. I hadn’t visited with him in a while and though I hadn’t exactly forgotten his unique gift for plots that are simultaneously labyrinthine and tight-as-a-tick, swift and contemplative, it was still a sort of giddy pleasure to be caught up in one again. The fact that he had worthwhile things to say about the center that was falling apart around him in the late sixties is icing on the cake.

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (Glenn Frankel, 2013)

Frankel is a little more devoted than I am to the idea of Cynthia Ann Parker’s particular captivity narrative being the true wellspring of Alan LeMay’s novel The Searchers and the subsequent classic film of the same name. Even he admits here and there that LeMay’s sources were numerous, so a broader-based approach might have been more productive.

Still, threading together the Old West and mid-twentieth century Hollywood required massive research (enough that I’m not going to quibble too much over occasional mis-statements of fact such as crediting John Ford with a directing Oscar for Stagecoach in 1939 or stating that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was Ford’s last collaboration with John Wayne or suggesting that the famous “Print the legend” line is the conclusion of TMWSLV–except to wonder why it must always be so). And, given how much territory it covers, the book is a good, swift read. [NOTE: I bogged down a little in the Cynthia Ann section but only because I had recently read S.C. Gwynne’s compelling account and found myself covering a lot of the same territory].

The book is a must have in any case for fans of the film or novel if only because it sheds a lot of light on LeMay and scriptwriter Frank Nugent, two figures that haven’t been written about or appreciated nearly enough. And all credit to Frankel for not falling into the common trap of elevating these unfairly obscured figures into more than they were–he knows that, for all the skill and inspiration supplied by others, the reason The Searchers has the hold it does is because Ford directed it and John Wayne found his greatest role in it and, even if I don’t agree with all his conclusions about the film’s real significance, this is still a valuable addition to the basic libraries on the varied subjects it addresses.

The Pioneers (James Fenimore Cooper, 1823)

Fourth in the historical chronology of The Leatherstocking Tales, but the first written. Maybe a third of the way through it, I thought it was reading a lot like a Jane Austen novel and subsequent research (I really should get hold of a good Cooper bio) revealed that he was in fact enamored of her and that his first novel, written a few years earlier, had been a more or less straight homage.

And as a comedy of manners it often works quite well. The usual criticisms of Cooper’s style are hardly unfounded. Yes, he’s stilted at times, given to melodrama (often at moments when it’s least effective), needlessly repetitive and prone to long-windedness and–a particularly salient criticism here–awkward plotting.

Of course, many a high modernist has been praised to the skies for exhibiting the very same qualities.

And very few of them have matched Cooper’s real strengths–his action scenes still haven’t been surpassed, his descriptions of the American wilderness are peerless and, in the Leatherstocking series at least, he found–over and over–those moments of real emotional power that have evaded–over and over–virtually every one of his stylistic “superiors.”

Plus, all the themes that still engage us in our little experiments in Statecraft and Nationhood are present, restlessly coursing through the national bloodstream right where he put them: tensions between Man and Nature; Civilization and the Wilderness; Private and Public interests; Capital and Community; Christian and Pagan (a theme that has made a particularly strong comeback in the last fifty years…with Christianity being put to flight both within and without the church walls); Progress and Primitivism; Hearts and Minds. The tone might be old-fashioned but the themes will always be contemporary. As long as there’s an “us” anyway.

And while it would be foolish to insist Cooper’s novels in general–and this one in particular–couldn’t do with some pruning, it would be even sillier to deny his more than occasional mordant wit:

“Mr. Doolittle belonged physically to a class of his countrymen, to whom nature has denied, in their formation, the use of curved lines. Everything about him was either straight or angular. But his tailor was a woman who worked, like a regimental contractor, by a set of rules that gave the same configuration to the whole human species.”

Or his knack for pegging social and psychological types at a glance, as in this look inside the dual and tortuous mind of a lawyer (where his real thoughts are inserted parenthetically among bland, oblique language virtually anyone who has ever dealt with a certain kind of legal mind will recognize):

“I will make the communication, sir, in your name (with your own qualifications), as your agent. Good morning, sir.–But stay proceedings, Mr. Edwards (so-called), for a moment. Do you wish me to state the offer of traveling as a final contract (for which consideration has been received at former dates (by sums advanced), which would be binding), or as a tender of services for which compensation is to be paid (according to future agreement between the parties), on performance of the conditions?”

Granted Joyceans–including Joyce–engaged in this sort of thing more frequently. But they never did it any better.

 

FEBRUARY BOOK REPORT (2/13)

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Studies in Classic American Literature (D.H. Lawrence, 1923)

A re-read. America (and, oh-by-the-way, our literature) rendered in lightning strike aphorisms and, like real lighting strikes, they alternately blind and illuminate.

So there are caveats. Still…

I didn’t realize it when I was a kid (I first read this in my twenties, which is getting to be a very long time ago) but there really isn’t much need to read other theoretical books on American “literature.” Wilson, Rahv, Cowley, Fiedler, et al, all marched dutifully along behind, thousands of wonderfully erudite pages at a time, and never got close to getting past him or offering up anything that was really new.

Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller (Janet Leigh w/Christopher Nickens, 1995)

Breezy and painless. Worthwhile for fans of the actress, the movie or anyone who wants to know just how wonderful a fellow Mr. Hitchcock really was.

 

JANUARY BOOK REPORT (1/13)

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Two good ones this past month:

Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller (Marshall Chapman, 2003)

Chapman is such a wonderful writer that I was half-way through this before I detected the inevitable whiff of the standard-issue bohemian contempt “quirky” singer-songwriters almost inevitably feel for us straights.

Having detected it, I decided not to bother about it. When the ride’s this good, there’s no use worrying about whether the operator is strictly on the up-and-up. Letting loose of my defenses turned out to be even more rewarding than I could have suspected, because the second half of the book is where the one-two emotional wallop of the (always funny) Chapman’s recounting of her mid-nineties concert at a Tennessee women’s prison and losing a brother to HIV-related illness made the maintenance of such defenses completely irrelevant.

Put it this way: I ordered the concert CD of the prison performance the minute I finished that particular chapter. I’ve bought somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 albums in my life…that’s the first one I’ve bought after reading about it in the artist’s own autobiography. So consider yourself warned! (The album is fantastic by the way.)

Empire of the Summer Moon (S.C. Gwynne, 2010)

Beautifully written and incisive history of the contest for the Southern Plains waged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between Mexicans, American settlers and Comanches, with decided emphasis on the latter.

The basic framing device is the remarkable story of Cynthia Ann Parker, kidnapped from her family’s Texas compound at the age of nine in 1836, fully adopted into the Comanche tribe, eventually the wife of a powerful chief and the mother of an even more powerful one, before being re-captured and brought back to a brief and miserable existence in the white world to which she could never re-adapt.

The only quibble is Gwynne’s occasional tendency to romanticize the Comanches (disappointing even though it shows only in flashes, not through the whole text). Here and there he buys into sentiments like those expressed by the Penateka band’s chief Sanaco, who spoke of the contested land having been “ours and always had been from time immemorial.” Several statements of this ilk pass unchallenged–a little odd since Gwynne himself well documents the brutal means by which the Comanches had driven the Apaches off the same land only a few generations before white men showed up (hardly “time immemorial”) and at least hints at the doubtless similar means by which the Apaches had once displaced the previous inhabitants.

Such small blind spots are only minor annoyances, however. Overall this is an even-keeled and moving account of monumental and fascinating events brought down to human scale. And ultimately it’s up to the reader to decide whether the weight of Gwynne’s skillful reporting and lucid prose style renders his occasional pining for the brand of “freedom” enjoyed by Comanche warriors moot.

To wit, here’s a typically (and appropriately) dispassionate passage concerning Rachel Parker Plummer, (Cynthia Ann’s seventeen-year-old cousin, taken in the same raid, who was later bought back and returned to her family, and was thus able to leave a record of her own far more typical experience before dying a short time later):

“She [Rachel] was also, unfortunately, pregnant. She had been four months pregnant at the time of the Parker raid, and had borne all of this misery [i.e., her capture and enslavement] in advancing stages of pregnancy. In October 1836 she gave birth to her second son. She knew immediately that the child was in danger. She spoke the Comanche language well enough to, as she put it, ‘expostulate with my mistress to advise me what to do to save my child.’ To no avail. Her master thought the infant too much trouble, and feeding him meant that Rachel was not able to work full-time. One morning, when the baby was seven weeks old, half a dozen men came. While several of them held Rachel, one of them strangled the baby, then handed him to her. When he showed signs of life, they took him again, this time tying a rope around his neck and dragging him through prickly pear cactus, and eventually dragged him behind a horse around a hundred-yard circuit. ‘My little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces,’ wrote Rachel.” [Brackets mine]

Freedom, I suppose, is where you find it.

DECEMBER BOOK REPORT (12/12)

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The Oswald File (Michael Eddowes, 1977)

My Kennedy assassination reading tends to follow a pattern:

See something that looks kind of intriguing (usually for cheap in a used book store or antique shop). Take it home and begin reading it that night, always in breathless anticipation–will this be the one that solves the mystery once and for all!

Get about half-way through within a day or so….Then look up the author and find out just what breed of crackpot I’ve run across this time ’round.

Eddowes probably wasn’t a crackpot–he was a lawyer who had been instrumental in getting England to outlaw the death penalty.

No, he was a pen for hire (by one of the right-wingers who was himself suspected of being involved in the plot to kill JFK–I tell you this stuff gets deep some times), put on the case to throw suspicion back on the Russkies.

And–perhaps because he began to believe his own hype–a fine, readable job he did, at least until it all bogs down in minutiae and disorganization and, yes, the usual unanswered questions and gaps in the author’s own logic at the very end.

Still, these things are worth reading because I always learn something about mindsets.

And I must say his points about Jack Ruby have made me determined to find out if there is a good biography anywhere existing of that eternal fly in the non-conspiracy ointment.

Last Summer (Evan Hunter, 1968)

The first I’ve read of Hunter (either under his own name or his nom-de-plume, Ed McBain). I’ll definitely want to read more. This is creepily effective in the manner of Patricia Highsmith. The ending was a bit of a let-down in dramatic terms, but that might have been the point: gang-rape as simply another act of modern banality. If so, I can’t say the ensuing decades have proved him wrong.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Stephen Rebello, 1990)

I frankly read this in anticipation of the movie Hitchcock, of which it is the principal source. The movie was pretty good. The book is better than good, a clear-eyed, unpretentious, supremely integral job of assessing the film as art, personal and mass psychology, and popular phenomenon.

And it did nothing to dispel my sneaking suspicion that Hitchcock’s reaction to Vera Miles’ astringency-into-madness performances in the premiere of his television show and The Wrong Man remains the undiscovered–and probably undiscoverable–country of his late career genius (where three of his four final more-or-less consensus masterpieces, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds, arrived out of far left-field and cut a swath modernity has been wandering about in ever since–helplessly as it were).

Whether we would have got there without him is one of those questions each of us must figure out for ourselves. I say yes–we humans are an excessively heedless and ungrateful lot–but I’ll very carefully thank you for not cutting my throat if we chance to disagree!

 

NOVEMBER BOOK REPORT (11/12)

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The Tooth and the Nail (Bill Ballinger, 1958)

Last and least of the “triptych” collection I’ve been perusing over the last six months. By this point, Ballinger was evidently hip-deep in television work and it shows. The first of the collection’s novels, 1950′s Portrait In Smoke, was within easy shouting distance of Cornell Woolrich or David Goodis. This is more along the lines of a top drawer Perry Mason episode. Still entertaining but a bit lacking in nerve and sweat.

Put it this way–months later, I can still remember exactly how Portrait In Smoke ends.

Without thinking about it.

This one?

I’m thinking….

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Tim Weiner, 2007)

600 hundred page brief on why free people do not need secret police forces.

Superbly done…I collected a bunch of telling quotes and thought long and hard about how best to present them.

Then I realized all there really is to say is here:

Jimmy Cliff “Trapped” (Studio Recording)

 

UNDERGROUND NOTES FROM THE STORY THAT NEVER ENDS…SHANGRI-LAS 2012

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I’ll have my November book report up some time this week: Meanwhile, here’s a mini-Review of Are You There God? It’s Me Mary: The Shangri-Las and the Punk Rock Love Song. (Tracy Landecker, Rhino Books, 2012)

Okay, it was the Shangri-Las, so my slow-learning self was going to get hold of this e-book-only item somehow (thanks Ann!)….

While I certainly wouldn’t recommend Landecker’s extended essay for anyone in pursuit of just-the-elusive-facts (for that, the best resource is still here)…or else here (my debut post), it does have its merits.

First, as often happens in these cases, any serious approach tends to raise fresh angles–the odd question or uncovered factoid that gives new dimension to a familiar story.

In this case, the dark-of-night example the author uncovers is that Mary Weiss’ father was found hanging from a telephone pole when she was only a few weeks old, apparently the victim of an accident while working at his job as a repairman–and an event that seems to have emotionally destroyed her mother (if you follow the link above to the Norton interview, you’ll be able to read Weiss’ response to why she sounded like she was crying at the end of “I Can Never Go Home Anymore”…basically, because she was).

That was so eerily prescient that it seemed impossible that it was also true, but a quick search around the net turned up a few Weiss interviews I had missed in the wake of her 2007 comeback and she does, in fact, confirm this in one of them.

That alone made this a worthy read for me.

But to tell the truth, Landecker also does a pretty good job of at least giving the Shangs’ myth-narrative a framework for beginners and she’s not half bad on the music itself, especially as it related to her personally (always the best way to write about rock and roll if not about everything). I can easily imagine her convincing someone who hadn’t heard, say, “He Cried,” to give it a listen–or, better yet, convincing someone who had heard it without really listening to give it another try. That’s certainly one of the objects of an exercise like this, and on that level, I think Landecker again largely succeeds.

As to the cultural analysis…Well, let’s just say to get all the way through this, you’ve got to be willing to give some slack to phrases like “ecstatic fatalism” (Interesting concept that: I mean if ecstasy really can accompany fatalism, I’ve been missing out something terrible!)

Or you might run into something like “The Shangs were liminal figures. That is, they were one of the first female groups to inhabit a strong and aggressive image usually reserved for men.”  You can go here (which happened to be the first time I laid eyes on the Shangri-Las “inhabiting” their “image usually reserved for men”) and see if the attempt to reconcile this statement with the available reality makes ants run around under your collar as it did mine.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing in this essay, which is disappointing and worse, distracting. And there’s at least one statement that’s something worse than a disappointment: Namely that “The internet holds precious little information on these four women and what is available is often anecdotal, apocryphal or of a nonspecific nature at best. Perhaps they wanted it that way.” (Italics mine.)

I say worse, because I don’t think anyone who has seen this video (which Landecker’s text strongly indicates she has) could possibly think “they” wanted it that way. On the other hand, anyone who has tried to fit the jagged pieces of the group’s story together over the years can certainly attest that a lot of other people wanted it just that way.

Anything that is written about the Shangri-Las at this point–especially anything written by a passionate fan, as Landecker surely is–should be dedicated to clearing the fog, not intensifying it by allowing emotion and romanticism to override–as opposed to aid and abet–reason and reality.

What Landecker’s mixed bag approach really proves–yet again–is that, after all this time, there is still something about the Shangri-Las and their music that induces irrationality.

In that sense, the author losing the plot even in this compressed essay form is depressing….but certainly familiar.

The Shangri-Las did not merely trade new boxes for old. They stepped into a brief spotlight and invented a new way for female performers to be. The consequences have been reverberating ever since and if it doesn’t look all that revolutionary now, that’s just a measure of how right they were to be themselves in a land that had always demanded young women be anything but when they stepped out on a stage.

Landecker flirts with the why of all this, but doesn’t really penetrate beyond the surfaces this very music should have taught her to distrust. So while I do recommend this, albeit with some fairly heavy qualifications…I’ll keep hoping for better.

 

BOOK REPORT (9/12 and 10/12)

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Rough September. Back to my usual slog in October!

Civil War in the Ozarks, Phillip W. Steele and Steve Cottrell (1993)

Fiction research. Bone dry and rather skimpy but it’s a building block. It looked like a close call for a while, but I ended up knowing more when I finished than when I started. Whew!

The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda, Devin McKinney 2012.

I could quibble.

McKinney hews to the crit-illuminati’s standard line on Fonda’s most important director (John Ford as “myth-maker,” g-r-r-r-r-r, there go my teeth, grinding again) and thus gets some important things wrong (such as concluding that Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is the greatest western ever made…I’m a fan of Leone and the movie and calling it the greatest western is one of those instances where one man’s opinion is one man’s opinion but it’s also what we used to call bull hockey).

He overrates by a mile Fonda’s contribution to The Wrong Man–the actor’s single collaboration with Hitchcock,which was utterly dominated, on screen and in the director’s mind, by Vera Miles–and does so in service of his own thesis, rather than the search for Fonda’s heart and mind or his place in the larger story McKinney is trying to tell.

And, for reasons that one can only guess at, he leaves Fonda’s relationship to Jimmy Stewart (lifelong best friend, staunch political opponent, and chief competition for Hollywood’s greatest male movie actor) so far in the background it’s basically invisible.

In a psychological bio-portrait of Henry Fonda, I don’t count these as minor flaws.

But boy, there’s a lot to like. McKinney can make sentences, paragraphs and pages move. He’s got a handle on Fonda’s odd combination of stiffness-without-rigidity, righteousness-without-priggishness, loneliness-without-existentialism and orneriness-without-meanness and on why and how he–and he alone–was able to turn these somewhat prickly attributes into first stardom and then iconography. And he’s especially strong on Fonda’s famous children. I don’t feel like I need to read a biography of either of them now, and they don’t take up a sentence more than they should in a 350-page book about their father.

Most importantly, McKinney is able, despite occasionally straying from the path, to make the case for his basic ideas. I especially like his notion of Fonda being the first real movie star president–the one the country most wanted to see be president in the movies (and perhaps still does), not least because we knew how unlikely it was we would see his movie like (as opposed to his “reality”) get anywhere near such high office.

McKinney makes a good deal of the deeply and genuinely Rooseveltian Fonda’s spiritual defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election–the man most people wanted to be president in the movies yielding, at death’s doorstep, to the man no one could imagine being president and who had not only come to overthrow the New Deal but would succeed, in part, because Fonda himself had rendered us so much assurance in the role.

By 1980, we were used to thinking of a movie star being president, even if we didn’t quite know it yet, and McKinney’s Fonda provides a nuanced outline of just why and how that came to pass.

That’s a lot to put on a movie star, but McKinney makes a convincing case that Fonda’s career and character can bear the weight. Leaving the actor’s famous and oft-repeated account of his childhood witness to an Omaha lynching for the end is a brilliant, novelistic stroke. Linking it to the unprovable but compelling and realistic possibility that Fonda’s father had seen something similar in his own youth on virtually the same ground ends the book on a note of epochal sadness and disorientation which this writer’s swift, economical style does full justice.

Caveats or no, highly recommended.

 

AUGUST BOOK REPORT (8/12)

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The Longest Second (Bill Ballinger, 1955)

Not as good as the first Ballinger I read a couple of months back. This one has an amnesiac trying to piece together his violent past, with the added twist–probably more effective as a film device–that he has lost his voice. Unfortunately, mute or otherwise, he has no interesting or likable qualities and he narrates about ninety percent of the book. The plot hinges on a good woman falling for him. The narrative offers no possible reason why she would. Given those limits, it’s still a swift, painless read and does have its own sort of bleak, internal consistency.

Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers (Charlie Louvin with Benjamin Whitmer)

An “as told to” by Louvin, who was the sane half of the extremely gifted and volatile brother act who helped keep old-fashioned music on the country charts in the fifties as the rock and roll tide was rising. As an insight into their music, it’s pretty limited. Charlie makes a few technical points but basically says they just did what they did and it worked so they kept doing it.

As a look at the hardscrabble Calvinist world country music sprang from it’s a valuable, though somewhat superficial account–more a series of snapshots than real insights until it reaches this remarkable passage near the end of the book:

“The thing about Ira (Charlie’s hellbound older brother who died in a car accident in 1965) was that he had a gift for songwriting, true, but he also had another gift that interfered with his songwriting. It was that calling to be a preacher. He knew his Bible, and the way he wrote his songs, the material that was in the songs, the way he placed it and used it, he would have been tremendous. Everybody on Sand Mountain always told me that was the cause of his drinking problem. That he was called to be a preacher, but refused, becoming a picker and grinner instead, and trying to drown out the call with liquor and women.

“I don’t think that’s the whole story, but I think it’s part of it. The worldly things were just too strong for him. He couldn’t overcome them long enough to be what he knew he ought to be, and that made his entire life a buildup of the misery in his mind. It haunted him that he didn’t do what he was put on this earth to do.”

Among other things, this puts the famous incident where Ira called Elvis a “white nigger” to his face into a more interesting light (it was in response to Elvis expressing his love for gospel music backstage after performing rock and roll out front).

Beyond that, as someone who has known dozens of just-starting-out preachers well, I can tell you that the call is answered out of fear as often as faith or inspiration–and I’ve never seen the basic dilemma of the doubter put more succinctly than that.

 

 

JULY BOOK REPORT (7/12)

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Our Kind of Traitor (John le Carre, 2011)

Cautiously recommended.

My few attempts to engage the old spymaster since the Smiley days have met with disappointment. Nothing exactly wrong with Our Game or The Tailor of Panama. Just sort of meh, as if le Carre had forgotten all the qualities that set him apart from John Buchan to begin with.

I picked this up because it was touted as a comeback and, for once, the crit-illuminati wasn’t selling an entire bill of goods. There’s an intriguing set-up and a degree of Jamesian force in the ending. The degree could have been a lot higher if le Carre had also been able to recapture his old delight in post-Victorian language and mid-Victorian character development, but at this moment in literary history, I’ll take what I can get.