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TRADING TWELVES

Name: TRADING TWELVES
Author: Ralph Ellison
ISBN: 0-375-50367-6

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF RALPH ELLISON AND ALBERT MURRAY

by Ralph Ellison & Albert Murray & edited by Albert Murray & John F. Callahan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2000

A small treasure.

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An open window into a literary friendship and beyond.

The late novelist Ralph Ellison and novelist and cultural critic Albert Murray were undergraduate acquaintances at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before later becoming friends in New York in the 1940s. But it was mostly in the 1950s (when for two years Ellison was at the American Academy in Rome and Murray was a US Air Force officer stationed in Morocco) that the bulk of these delightfully engaging exchanges were written. This is Ellison and Murray at their relaxed best, shooting the breeze about photography, music, or cooking; riffing on Faulkner, Malraux, Robert Penn Warren, or T.S. Eliot; propounding their own literary and cultural theories; or critiquing the Eisenhower administration’s halfhearted efforts at school integration. Ellison, as it turns out, was as fussy about language as he was particular about the ingredients he used for his beloved pigs’ feet. They both were astute observers of the Jazz scene and seemed to know every bit of minutiae involving the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands. (It is from jazz, in fact, that the title—a reference to the 12 bars of music that are “traded” back and forth during a riff—is derived.) Murray, two years Ellison’s junior, published his first novel (Train Whistle Guitar) some 20 years after Invisible Man. In that respect, he often comes across as the student to Ellison’s teacher. But there seemed to be no competition between them. Ellison disclosed to Murray as early as the 1950s that he was at work on a second novel that was never completed before Ellison died in 1994. John Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor, was able eventually to cobble together notes from this work-in-progress and finally to publish it last year as Juneteenth. Callahan also helped Murray select and edit his correspondence with Ellison.

A small treasure.

Pub Date: June 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-50367-6

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Modern Library

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF RALPH ELLISON
by Ralph Ellison edited by John F. Callahan Marc C. Conner

- BOOK REVIEW
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING
by Ralph Ellison and edited by John Callahan and Adam Bradley

- BOOK REVIEW
FLYING HOME
by Ralph Ellison

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SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

FROM LBJ'S GUNS AND BUTTER TO REAGAN'S VOODOO ECONOMICS

by Hobart Rowen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1994

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Strong language and strong medicine about the decline of the American economy, but marred by overwrought prose and Monday- morning quarterbacking. Rowen, a columnist for the Washington Post, attributes America's economic decline not to unfair trading practices by Japan or other external factors. It is, he says, a case of ``self- strangulation.'' Rowen examines the men and women who have made economic policy since the Johnson administration. Without attributing any venality (other than perhaps the playing of partisan politics) and admitting that people did the best they could, he nonetheless does assign blame for the low economic state to which the nation has sunk. Emerging from WW II as the only country with an industrial base untouched by war, the US was the most powerful nation on earth. Then, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, it went from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. Rowen ignores JFK, whom he knew personally and who arguably set in motion events leading to the problems Rowen cites. The current crisis, he argues, was initiated by Johnson's Vietnam adventure, which crippled the Great Society and set up a virulent inflationary cycle in its attempt to have both guns and butter. The blunders of LBJ gave way to Nixon's disastrous wage- and price- control attempts, and the abandonment of the gold standard. Ford and Carter were hamstrung by OPEC and were, according to the author, nothing short of inept. By far his harshest criticism is leveled at Reagan's ``voodoo economics,'' with its vain hope that wealth would trickle down from the top. Rowen also attacks Congress, describing it as spineless. For the future, he says, Americans will have to adjust to the economic rise of Asia, focus on high-tech industries, and become less greedy. Rowen's case is compelling, if not totally convincing. He also gives readers a poignant mini-memoir about the life of a newspaperman covering the powerful.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8129-1864-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Times/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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CHRISTINA STEAD

A BIOGRAPHY

by Hazel Rowley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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An absorbing biography that will help Stead's fans place her fiction in the context of her life and may well attract new readers to her work. Christina Stead (190283), who was born and died in Australia (about which, writes Rowley, she was ``both nostalgic and patronising''), did her writing during her years in Europe and the US. Although she tapped real events and people for her fiction—and not just for her autobiographical novels, including the superb The Man Who Loved Children—she could be secretive in her private papers, identifying people by fictional names, writing in code, and ultimately destroying many documents. Despite this obstacle, Rowley (an Australian academic, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University) offers a coherent and convincing portrait that reaches back into a youth in which Stead was overshadowed by her father, who first instilled in her a lifelong socialist orientation, insecurity about her appearance (he dubbed her ``Pig Face''), and a yearning to be adored by a man. When she arrived in London in 1928, Stead found just the man—William Blake (originally Blech), whom Rowley succinctly describes as a ``Marxist investments manager who seemed to know something about everything.'' Blake hired her to be his secretary, and Stead accompanied him to Paris, where their romance flourished—despite a wife who would not divorce Blake for 23 years. When the bank employing Blake collapsed, the pair fled to New York. Stead's writings earned only modest royalties even when favorably reviewed, and Blake could not find work, so they returned to Europe in a consistently difficult hunt for economic security that gave their lives a nomadic flavor. By 1949, Stead said to a friend, ``I have been a writer, quite unsuccessfully for twenty years,'' although a revival of interest in her work, which began in the mid-1960s, helped her return to Australia in 1969 as a famous author and ``Official Personage.'' A welcome study of an underrated author. (16 pages of photos, not seen)