Though they sometimes have an ephemeral, dashed-off feel, these pieces will please McMurtry fans and be of interest to...
Occasional writings on matters western by a noted interpreter of the region.
Born in the New York Review of Books, these 12 pieces are not so much essays as extended book reviews, a genre in which McMurtry—novelist (Duane’s Depressed, 1999, etc.), essayist (Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, 1999, etc.), memoirist (Paradise, p. 566), bookseller, and bibliophile—is an ascended master. McMurtry notes that good writing about the West has long been the exception rather than the rule, even though the region has produced a flood of books over the last two centuries; this condition, he adds, may be a failure of talent but is more likely a failure of community, for books seem to be less than completely cherished on the still-raw frontier, which, he writes, has quickly devolved from hero-spawning outback to ennui-spawning suburbia. At the top of his list of exceptional works are the journals of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, full of odd spellings and veiled episodes, which “are to the narrative of the American West as the Iliad is to the epic or as Don Quixote is to the novel”; others are Leslie Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead, the environmental writings of Edward Abbey, and the lushly inventive Zuni ethnographies of Frank Hamilton Cushing. McMurtry is kind to lesser writers, though he reserves a little venom for a deserving few: “almost any passage in any of Zane Grey’s books makes it cruelly obvious that the man failed to master even the most basic unit of his craft: the prose sentence”; “I feel sure that one reason for the immense, continuing popularity of Louis L’Amour’s works is that he shared no ironies.”
Though they sometimes have an ephemeral, dashed-off feel, these pieces will please McMurtry fans and be of interest to students of the American West.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-940322-92-7
Page Count: 178
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
In a perceptive look at the nation's most distinctive region, Grantham (History/Vanderbilt Univ.) examines the relationship between the South and the rest of the United States during the 20th century. He delineates this relationship in terms of several major themes, exploring the modern history of sectional conflict, the many areas of compromise among the regions, cultural convergence between the South and other areas of the country (with the consequent blurring of southern culture's special features), and the persistence, nonetheless, of southern distinctiveness in the nation's consciousness. Conflict was reflected both in the mutually unflattering perceptions and attitudes of Southerners and Northerners and in substantive differences between the regions on party alignment, civil rights, Prohibition, and federal regulation of utilities, tariffs, and banks. Although it often disagreed with the Northeast, Midwest, and West on these and other issues, the South in Grantham's view pervasively influenced American politics and society as a whole in many ways. Prior to WW II and the civil rights movement, the Democratic party was controlled by its southern wing, and southern Democrats, from Richard B. Russell to Huey Long, were a powerful force in Congress, one with which successive presidents had to reckon. In more recent years conservative southern factions have demonstrated similar influence in the Republican party. With what Grantham calls the ``Second Reconstruction'' of the 1960s and with the emergence of the Sunbelt South, the region has lost its traditional hallmark of backwardness, developing an increasingly urbanized economy and becoming in many ways more prosperous and progressive than the decaying, racially polarized North. Nonetheless, Grantham argues, the South retains some of its special cultural features, including a fervent religiosity, a ``subculture of violence,'' and a profusion of literary talent, from Barry Hannah to Bobbie Ann Mason. A rich, sympathetic, warts-and-all portrait of the South.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016773-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
A book both educational and emotional.
A Vietnam War story about the mostly unreported role of military wives who ignored protocol to help free their husbands, held as prisoners of war, from torture by the North Vietnamese.
Relying on extensive personal interviews and previously unseen documents, Lee (Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause, 2014) builds to February 1973, when 115 American POWs departed North Vietnam on U.S. military transport planes to receive health care, debriefings, and finally emergence into public view. Many of the American airmen never thought they would be shot from the sky, captured, and tortured—partly because of their ultraconfidence in their training, partly because they severely underestimated the fighting capabilities of the North Vietnamese military. Their wives back in the States, many with children, naturally felt desperate to learn the fates of their husbands. However, commanders in the American military services and diplomats in the U.S. State Department told them, often in condescending fashion, to remain quiet and docile so that negotiations with the enemy could proceed. Eventually, after years of excruciating worry, the wives of the prisoners—as well as fliers missing in action—began to actively discuss how to remedy the situation. As more years passed with no progress, wives on bases scattered around the country began organizing together. Lee’s cast of determined women is extensive and occasionally difficult to track as they enter and depart the narrative. Two of the most prominent are Sybil Stockdale (husband Jim) and Jane Denton (husband Jeremiah). (The renowned John McCain does not play a major role in the narrative.) In addition to the wrenching personal stories, the author handles context gracefully, especially regarding the wives and their ability to find their voices amid the continuing saga of an unjust war. “If these military wives hadn’t rejected the ‘keep quiet’ policy and spoken out,” she writes, “the POWs might have been left to languish in prison.”
A book both educational and emotional.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-16110-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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