maps, not seen)
A fine, if at times over-focused, portrait of Massachusetts’ famed Cape and the islands that surround it, from travel writer
and naturalist Schneider (The Adirondacks, 1997). Doubtless there will be plenty of Cape Codders who will take umbrage at so green an incomer (Schneider has lived on the Vineyard for only a decade) claiming to know their territory well enough to write a history. Umbrage and insularity are their birthright, of course. But Schneider pulls it off with aplomb, walking softly and ending his tale in the19th century, with nary a Cronkite nor a Belushi in sight. Schneider draws out from historical documents a sturdy sense of the place as the Wampanoags and Nauset people experienced it in the pre—Columbian era. Then came the Basques in pursuit of cod, the kidnapper Gorges in pursuit of gold, and Bartholomew Gosnold in pursuit of sassafras for the syphilitics of Europe—all bringing the disease and displacement that were to become the Indian’s lot. Schneider explains how to tell Pilgrim from Puritan, how they fared in those first few cruel years, and what characterized their dealings with the natives. Whaling soon came to dominate the local economy, and here Schneider gets bogged down in a minute retelling of the voyage of the whaling ship Essex. Eventful as it was, so much detail throws the story out of balance, for one great pleasure of Schneider’s writing is the braiding of incidentals that keeps the story nimble—sketches of freebooters named Coffin and monopolists named Starbuck—and provides fast asides: Vineyarders looking down upon Nantucket as "a place known to be populated by pink-trousered probable Republicans"; Nantucketers scorning Vineyarders who "wouldn’t think of loaning their private beach keys to their own first born"; and all of them despairing of the Cape itself as a "lost cause." For the most part, a tight and cruising historical narrative—a rich tale for so small a piece of property. (drawings, photos,
maps, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-5928-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
Wyatt-Brown (History/Univ. of Florida; Southern Honor, not reviewed, etc.) buries a good idea under an avalanche of scholarly detail. Too much of this study is concerned with the first Percys in America, an interesting but not exceptional bunch of slaveholding frontiersmen led by one ``Don Carlos'' Percy, an apparent bigamist who also seems to have shared the Percy predisposition to melancholia. His other legacies to future Percys were a fondness for Stoicism, Catholicism, conservatism, and an aristocratic sense of honor. Thus Wyatt-Brown's thesis (i.e., ax) to demonstrate (i.e., grind): that generations of Percys are linked by the ethics of chivalry, the tendency to chronic depression, and the predilection for mythmaking. Among the mythmakers were two 19th- century sisters (Wyatt-Brown calls them ``two Southern Brontâs'') who churned out mediocre verse and commonplace gothic fiction. A later relative, Sarah Dorsey, achieved minor fame as a postCivil War romance novelist and major notoriety as the close friend of the married Jefferson Davis, with whom she bemoaned the decline of the South during Reconstruction. Real distinction came in the 20th century with LeRoy Percy, a US senator from Mississippi, who was an ardent foe of the Ku Klux Klan. His son, the poet William Alexander Percy, shared the same sense of noblesse oblige. ``A bachelor with severe inhibitions'' (i.e., a closeted homosexual), Will eventually published Lanterns on the Levee, a classic of the modern South. Walker Percy's grandfather (the senator's brother) and father both committed suicide, but the novelist worked through his existential melancholy, argues Wyatt-Brown, by creating many fine works of fiction. No literary critic, Wyatt-Brown forgets why most readers would pick up this book in the first place. He barely mentions Walker Percy until well over 200 pages into the book, by which time most nonhistorians are likely to have set it aside.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-505626-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Wingo rather frothily admits that, like ``all good sea stories,'' her reminiscence of her stint in the WAVES has been ``embellished.'' Now a retired teacher and a Santa Monica community activist, Wingo remembers feeling like Joan of Arc at her enlistment in the WAVES (Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service) in 1944 at the age of 20. An Irish Catholic raised in Detroit, she attends boot camp at Hunter College in the Bronx, where the ``barracks'' are a five-story apartment building. Recruits are called Ripples (``Little Waves, silly''), and Wingo says that ``boot camp is like a harder Girl Scout camp'' where you learn that a ``misbegotten granny knot could screw up the whole war.'' Her bunkmates (the characters are composites) include Coralee Tolliver, a chunky ``hillbilly'' whom she despises (though Wingo later serves as her maid of honor), and Barbara Lee Corman, who calls everyone ``honeychile'' and juggles five ``fian-says.'' The trio gets assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago where they train on guns. Following a Navy Day parade in which Wingo, in full dress, rides astraddle a torpedo, she and her buddies are shipped out to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to train the men in the Armed Guard for at-sea duty while they, as women, will remain ashore. Wingo falls for a tattooed sailor named Blackie (he calls her ``Toots'') until he admits he visits prostitutes because it ``saves the nice girls for when we want to marry them.'' She describes a chaotic V-J Day celebration and a whirlwind tour of New York City; and she offers an entire chapter about getting drunk and sick aboard a Russian ship anchored in San Francisco Bay. Jocular and occasionally appealing, this suffers from an almost complete lack of hard information or historical perspective on the very real contributions of the WAVES.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1994
ISBN: 1-55750-924-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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