Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings...
The embodiment of revolution comes in for an appropriately anarchic—and wild, and thoroughly enjoyable—appreciation.
Fans of Mornington Crescent, a game of “complete and utter nonsense” that is more familiar to Brits than Americans, will be quite at home with blogger/editor/journalist/McSweeney’s regular Collins’s elegantly written but highly centrifugal treatment of what happened to Thomas Paine’s remains. “Any rube visiting Britain” is free to ask the rules of Mornington Crescent, observes Collins, but he is sure to be “methodically flummoxed with absurdly fake histories of the game and utter evasion as to its actual workings.” So it is with this masterpiece of misdirection, which opens at a gay bar in Manhattan on the site of which Paine died. A few beers later, Collins is chasing across the water, where William Cobbett, antinomian author of countless libertarian pamphlets, had spirited Paine’s bones. His skull a Yorick-like talisman for London radicals, Paine did yeoman service in the afterlife, but eventually, bits and pieces of his body went wandering off into the collections of vicars and natural philosophers—and as to just where, well, Collins asks and is flummoxed, and not just because all the high street house numbers have been changed since Georgian days. Confronted with failure, Collins takes delightful detours into the odd lives of the Victorian vegetarians and phrenologists and freethinkers who kept the Paine cult going as Paine himself was steadily forgotten in their day, a sad fate for an author whose Common Sense once sold second only to the Bible. The search takes Collins through dusty warrens and back alleys and rainy roads, all full of the promise of adventure; even a London bench “missing every single one of its slats” has a role in the great game that’s afoot.
Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings and conventions, is smiling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-502-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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
Take a journey to Ixtlan—by way of Swaziland—in this verbose, self-conscious narrative by the only white man to have ever become a sangoma, a traditional African healer. A former television writer and co-author of Makeba: My Story (not reviewed), Hall spent two years learning how to summon his lidlotis, the spirits of the dead who emerge to possess his body during nightly rituals. As a sangoma-in-training, Hall accumulates eight spirits, including those of a distantly related Scotsman, an American Indian, a fetus (who encourages him to have his own child), and a most incongruous 1930s ad man named Harry, who conversationally tells Hall it was he who thought of the slogan ``Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.'' Under the tutelage of senior sangomas, Hall digs for medicinal roots; reads animal bones to diagnose physical and spiritual ailments of his patients; bathes in goat blood; and divines the location of hidden objects before admiring tribespeople. Yet all is not rosy, since Hall faces grudging acceptance by the community and is perpetually plagued by foot infections arising from nocturnal barefoot dancing while under the thrall of his lidlotis. A self-described former ``casual'' Catholic, Hall continually confronts his own doubts about the legitimacy of his experiences. Is he schizophrenic, he wonders? Would anyone back home in the States believe him? Is he worthy of being a sangoma? After easily resolving these questions through a fairly insignificant encounter with a colorful troubadour, Hall undergoes his final ritual tests (which include a vomiting contest) and becomes a full-fledged traditional healer. Hall's prose drips with hackneyed phrases such as ``muscular mountains'' and ``ineffable sadness,'' and while he faithfully describes his ritual training, the details can become wearying, particularly the daily digging and grinding of sacred herbs. Readers curious about this vanishing tribal practice may find Hall's book informative, as will glossolaliacs who will appreciate his lidlotis utterances. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-87477-780-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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