Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday December 29, 2010
|
OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: Adventures of an Observer
Garry Wills
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022144
195 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by James Rosen
"I am not interesting in myself," Garry Wills declares at the outset of "Outside Looking In." American readers have steadfastly disagreed over the last five decades, during which time Wills, an ex-Jesuit seminarian turned journalist and professor, has published nearly 40 books on politics, religion and history, almost unfailingly to critical acclaim. All have been thoughtful and provocative; many became bestsellers; two won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and one -- "Lincoln at Gettysburg" (1992) -- received the Pulitzer Prize.
Such a mind can hardly be uninteresting. Yet Wills, now 76, proceeds here as though he believes it is, allotting little space in this slender memoir to self-examination. His subtitle, "Adventures of an Observer," neatly captures the author's view of himself, Zelig at the ramparts ("I have been able to meet many interesting people and observe fascinating events, partly by being unobtrusive"), while the main title defines the volume's readers, who are at all points barred admission to Wills' complex interior.
Instead, "Outside Looking In" functions like an erudite jukebox, summoning amusing, tragic and telling anecdotes at a rapid clip, each well told, all enriching our understanding of postwar America's politics, passions and pieties. Chapters are named, guilelessly, for the famous people ("Nixon," "Carter and others," "Clintons") and momentous events ("Dallas" for the Jack Ruby case, "Turbulent Times" for the civil rights and antiwar protests) the author has covered. This structure is ill conducive to narrative, though, and sometimes makes for disc-jockey segues like "I met another great singer" and, not too many pages later, "Another singer I got to know well ..."
Retracing his old steps, Wills shadows the "new" Richard Nixon across New Hampshire in late 1967; jousts with Lillian Hellman over the Alger Hiss case (in which Wills, angering liberal friends, concluded that the New Dealer was an "obvious" Soviet spy); catches the pre-presidential Jimmy Carter in a lie; and elicits a brushback from Martha Stewart ("Oh, cut it out") at the Clinton White House, after Wills asked her to critique a table setting.
Separate chapters assay William F. Buckley, Jr., an early mentor and later antagonist (after Wills's politics drifted leftward); Natalie Wills, who seems never to have minded when her husband bolted from town for the next Esquire assignment, leaving her with the kids; and Jack Wills. Only this latter chapter, which enumerates the many failings of the author's father -- a charming but pugnacious gambler and philanderer -- brings us anywhere near Garry's inner self. That Jack, in irritation, once bribed his bookworm son $5 to forgo reading for a week was one of many experiences leading Wills to acknowledge that "I was often an outsider in my family."
From his silence on the point, Wills, we must conclude, has never suffered any qualms, like those Janet Malcolm anatomizes in "The Journalist and the Murderer," about the moral ambiguities inherent in the journalistic enterprise. Indeed, missing from these pages is any indication that Wills has ever felt fear, shame or regret in his entire adult life. Readers seeking a comprehensive autobiography must accordingly cobble it from this and previous books, like "Bare Ruined Choirs" (1972) and "Why I Am a Catholic" (2002), in which Wills recounted his boyhood and religious education; and "Confessions of a Conservative" (1979), an earlier memoir that chronicled his apprenticeship at National Review and subsequent philosophical evolution, and which featured a similar, but richer, portrait of Buckley.
Still, "Outside Looking In" is essential for readers interested in this prolific and immensely gifted writer -- notwithstanding his protestations that they should not be. We learn, for example, how much stock Wills places in his doctoral training, at Yale, in the classics. "Greek," he writes here, "is the most economical intellectual investment one can make. On many things that might interest one -- law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama -- there will be constant reference back to the founders of those forms in our civilization. ... It helps, in all these cases, to know something about the originals."
And there is also a clue, in a chapter about Wills' travels to opera houses, to what led him out of the seminary and into the arena of reportage and commentary that Buckley called the controversial arts -- and it had as much to do with "Rigoletto" as with the record of our times. "I loved," Wills writes, "the many uses of the human voice."
James Rosen, a Fox News correspondent and author of "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate," is at work on a book about the Beatles.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
THREE BOOKS ABOUT HORSES
NA
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
As anyone who's ever read "Black Beauty" or Cormac McCarthy knows, fiction can be rough on horses. Not only must they look majestic and carry their riders faithfully through deserts, snowstorms and bullet fire, they're frequently expected to have magical healing qualities and put up with troubled teens. (Nobody puts these kinds of demands on zebras.) But for readers raised on "The Black Stallion," "Misty of Chincoteague" and "My Friend Flicka," there's also nothing like a good horse book to unlock your inner 11-year-old.
1. Nicholas Evans, whose 1995 best-seller "The Horse Whisperer" launched a catch phrase and a thousand horseback-riding lessons, is back with his fifth book, "The Brave" (Little, Brown, $26.99). In the late 1950s, lonely 8-year-old Tom Bedford adores cowboy westerns -- but only ones featuring "real" cowboys. He has no patience for the Lone Ranger, Gene Autry or any cowboy who sang or "carried two shiny silver guns ... and had holsters with no leg-ties. How could you be a serious gunfighter without a leg-tie? "Sent away to a sadistic British boarding school, Tom hangs on by dint of his fantasy life. When his mom gets a chance to star in movies, Tom goes west -- Hollywood, that is -- where he learns to ride and shoot while his mom dates an actor on one of the TV shows he loved. Then something goes very wrong, and the aspiring actress ends up on death row. In the present, Tom, an author and documentarian, lives alone in Montana, estranged from his Marine son, who has been charged with the murder of Iraqi civilians. Evans cuts back and forth between past and present, unraveling the twin mysteries, while Tom tries to find a way to help his boy.
2. For an entertaining novel about forgiveness and the four-footed, try "The Blessings of the Animals" (Harper Perennial; paperback, $14.99), by Katrina Kittle. After rescuing a starving horse, who responds only by biting and kicking her, veterinarian Cami Anderson hits more trouble: Her husband announces that he's leaving her and their teenage daughter for a 22-year-old. Cami has a wry likability that carries the novel over too many romantic entanglements, and, refreshingly, Kittle doesn't believe in fairy tales. Not only is the horse recognizable as an actual Equus caballus -- rather than a unicorn with an invisible horn -- but there are plenty of furballs for animal lovers of all stripes, including a three-legged ginger cat, a rescued pregnant donkey and a white goat who could teach Houdini a thing or two.
3. How tough is Vaclav Skala? The Texas farmer hitches his four sons to the plow and saves his horses for racing in Bruce Machart's densely told novel, "The Wake of Forgiveness" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). All four boys grow up to be weathered and have crooked necks, but Karel, the youngest, also has a gift for racing that his father uses to increase his holdings. Then wealthy Spaniard Guillermo Villasenor shows up with his three girls and a proposition: One of his daughters will race Karel. If Karel loses, the families will unite. Like "The Brave," this novel jumps back and forth in time -- primarily between 1910 and 1924, when Karel is the lone brother left working what was his father's land -- but Machart is operating on another level when it comes to writing. "The Wake of Forgiveness," which hails from the Robert Olmstead school of western, is a dark tale about fathers and sons, missing mothers and the poison that lies at the heart of the question, Who's to blame?
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews books for the Christian Science Monitor.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT: A Personal Biography
Susan Cheever
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1416569916
298 pages
$26
Reviewed by Elaine Showalter, professor emeritus of English at Princeton University and the editor of the volume on Louisa May Alcott for the Library of America
Louisa May Alcott has long been the favorite children's writer of literary women from Gertrude Stein to Nora Ephron. And almost every Alcott fan chooses Jo March, from "Little Women," as her favorite character. Jo is the rebel, the artist, the independent woman who considers whether or not to marry (Alcott herself did not).
Novelist and memoirist Susan Cheever also identifies with Jo, and with Alcott as her creator. In her preface to this new biography, Cheever describes reading "Little Women" for the first time when she was 12and being "electrified. ... It was as if this woman from long ago was living inside my head." She persuaded her father, novelist John Cheever, to take her to the Alcott museum Orchard House in Concord, Mass., where she was "thrilled to be in the presence of the real thing." Even then, she recalls, she was drawn to Jo March: "As a naughty, rebellious girl in the throes of puberty, I needed help, and it seemed to come from the pages of Little Women. What did it mean to be a woman anyway?"
Cheever calls her book a "personal biography" of Louisa May Alcott, and brings her own family background to the Alcott story. Accordingly, while many Alcott biographers emphasize the influence of Louisa May's mother, Abbya, the idealized Marmee of "Little Women," Cheever follows John Matteson's prize-winning "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father" (2007) in emphasizing Louisa's father, Bronson, the improvident, eccentric and maddening Transcendentalist philosopher.
As a progressive teacher and theorist of education, Bronson taught his own daughters as well as his pupils at Temple School, but he battled with the tomboyish and feisty Louisa, who fought him on every disciplinary test and was often spanked and punished for her resistance. Although she adored him, she grew up to be critical of his self-indulgence, oracular tones and inability to earn a living.
Certainly, Bronson's ill-fated decision to take his young family to live in an agricultural utopian commune, at Fruitlands Farm in Massachusetts, was a turning point in Louisa's life. She was 10 when they arrived at the isolated farmhouse in June 1843 and 11 when they left in January 1844, and she never forgot the weird assortment of vegetarians, socialists, fanatics, celibates and nudists who joined them in their failed experiment, or the disasters of near-starvation, sickness and paternal breakdown that she later satirized in "Transcendental Wild Oats" (1873). After Fruitlands, Louisa lost her childhood faith in her father's radical theories and became the honorary son, with responsibility for supporting her family.
She had started publishing lurid, anonymous sensation stories by age 30, but when the Civil War began, she enlisted as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown. Cheever forcefully describes these significant six weeks in Alcott's life, when she tended wounded and dying men from the battle of Fredericksburg and, until she came down with typhoid and had to go home, saw up close the tragedy, bloodshed and administrative chaos of a war her father and other New England abolitionists romanticized from a distance. During this period, Alcott developed her "wry, direct" narrative voice and the Dickensian power that led to her finest writing, but she paid the price of lifelong illness, probably from mercury poisoning.
When she was asked by the publisher Thomas Niles, and urged by her father, to write a book for girls, Alcott resisted; she did not want to abandon her aspirations to serious adult fiction. But "Little Women," despite her misgivings, was what Cheever calls an accidental masterpiece, a great book in which Alcott, "seemed to shift from being an artist pushing toward meaning to being an artist able to relax and discover meaning." When she stopped trying to impress Emerson and the sages of Concord and wrote about what she knew, Alcott released her genuine creative powers.
Cheever writes insightfully about Alcott's evolution as a writer and her struggles as a dutiful literary daughter. But, as she admits, there are many excellent biographies of Alcott to choose from, including Harriet Reisen's 2009 study, "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women." Cheever is a lively and likable writer, but she doesn't add anything new to what we already know about Alcott's life. Perhaps if she had followed her promise of a "personal biography" and said more about her own struggles to become a writer in the wake of a brilliant, difficult father, "Louisa May Alcott" might have been a compelling, as well as a charming, book.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
LEADING ROLES: 50 Questions Every Arts Board Should Ask
Michael M. Kaiser
Brandeis Univ
ISBN 978-1584659068
130 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Barbara Hall, who writes about the arts and education
"The first thing to do when it becomes clear that an organization is in crisis is to relax. Do not panic."
So writes Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
"He deliberately brings an outward calm into a situation where things are falling apart," The Washington Post once observed of Kaiser. Another periodical aptly dubbed him "a rescue artist." Among the beneficiaries of Kaiser's talents have been the Washington National Opera, the Royal Opera House in London and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
His new book, "Leading Roles," is a rich yet tidy cornucopia of solutions for the challenges facing the American arts scene. His advice, presented as responses to a series of 50 questions, stems from his 2009 whirlwind tour that took him from Boston to San Francisco. All told, he made himself available to 11,000 arts leaders and concerned members of the public in almost every state.
The book is pragmatic -- but also occasionally, abruptly mischievous. Kaiser decries, for instance, the "edifice complex," the desire of so many arts leaders to "build, build, build." He addresses pressing concerns, such as dwindling audiences, that threaten too many arts endeavors today. And he acknowledges a need for more robust fundraising, providing practical advice for planning galas and using the Internet to solicit support. Government financing, he makes clear, is no panacea, particularly given the recent sea change in Congress.
Adroitly holding up a mirror to his own experiences, he presents wonderful counsel on best practices to run arts organizations of color, and he cites creative successes in Chicago, where cultural institutions pool resources for the benefit of all. He discusses delicate subjects, too, such as how to oust a problematic board member graciously.
Throughout, Kaiser never loses his perspective: "So many plans for arts organizations," he notes, "detail extensive strategies for marketing, fund-raising, financial management, and board development, but omit one crucial element: the art."
The author is compelling as he scopes the horizon, sizing up a future in which global cooperation will loom large for the arts. (Under his tutelage, the Kennedy Center has established worldwide ties in which resources are shared.)
In addition, over the decades Kaiser has made a mark as a leader in arts education, and he's justifiably concerned about what's happening -- or not happening -- in American classrooms:
"Since so many public schools in the United States and across the globe do not include arts education in their curricula, we now have a generation of young people who have not developed the habit of arts engagement. This is a serious issue, since we rely on this generation to be the art creators, audiences, donors, volunteers, and board members of the future."
"No other subject is taught with such carelessness and inconsistency," he continues. "Board members must inquire about the true impact of the arts education programming of their organization. How do the programs intersect with others offered in the community? How do children get a comprehensive arts education? If we only count the number of children in our programs, if we only take heart in their smiling reactions to our student performances, we are not necessarily fulfilling our missions."
But despite his cleareyed knowledge of the challenges, Kaiser calls for us to be optimistic: "Indeed," he writes, "a turnaround is ninety percent psychological."
Turning to this savvy, knowing book by a maestro in his field is a practical first step.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 THE TURQUOISE LEDGE
BLOODLANDS: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
SUDDEN GENIUS?: The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs
THREE GIFT BOOKS
EDGE |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
