Edward Morris

Memoir

A personal look at the life of a music legend

Review by Edward Morris
Within the company of songwriters, Rodney Crowell is a revered name, particularly in the field of country music. His compositions include ”’Til I Gain Control Again,” “Ashes By Now,” “An American Dream,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “Song for the Life,” “Shame on the Moon” and the Grammy-winning “After All This Time.” He has also earned considerable distinction as a recording artist, scoring five No. 1 country hits in a row during the late 1980s.

 

But the reader will learn nothing of these achievements in Chinaberry Sidewalks, Crowell’s simultaneously gritty and affectionate account of growing up as an only child in post-World War II Houston, Texas. His focus is on his dirt-poor, blue-collar parents—J.W. and Cauzette—who could charitably be called “dysfunctional” but more accurately “abusive.” And yet Crowell’s stories brim with appreciation for them, even as they keep him wary and occasionally terrorized by the side effects of their corrosive discontent with the world and each other.
 
 
J.W. drinks too much and falls too short of his modest dreams; Cauzette, besides being epileptic (a source of pity and embarrassment to young Crowell), seeks comfort in raw, hellfire Christianity.  One of the earliest coping skills Crowell develops is discerning his father’s mood by the way he pulls his battered car into the driveway. But the father who is quick to lash out is also sensitive enough to take his two-year-old son to see what would prove to be the great Hank Williams’ next-to-last performance. And his mother is a daily example of courage and inventiveness under fire.

 

Crowell emerges from his narrative as a latter-day Huck Finn, a cheeky kid who finds adventures, friends and grotesquely comic adults in every corner of his scrappy neighborhood. Fortunately, he brings to these adventures Tom Sawyer’s romantic imagination. Indeed, it is his imagination that makes his hardscrabble existence not just tolerable but inspirational. A graceful prose writer, Crowell is able to convey his fears and deprivations without being maudlin or sentimental.

 

Ultimately, Chinaberry Sidewalks is a hymn to resilience, to the ability to understand, compartmentalize, contextualize, rationalize and forgive until all the causes for bitterness and self-pity are distilled away and only the residue of love remains.

 

Edward Morris has written about country music for CMT.

 

Read our account of Rodney Crowell's pre-release reading and party in Nashville.
 

 

Within the company of songwriters, Rodney Crowell is a revered name, particularly in the field of country music. His compositions include ”’Til I Gain Control Again,” “Ashes By Now,” “An American Dream,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “Song for the Life,” “Shame on the Moon”…

Looking back on a life

Review by Edward Morris

The new collection of essays by historian Tony Judt looks back on a life well and enjoyably lived—and one that was rapidly coming to a close. In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease—a condition that rapidly reduced him to a quadriplegic. Unable to write down his thoughts for these final essays (which he had to dictate), he resorted to a mnemonic device he named “the memory chalet,” a place in which he could store and retrieve his thoughts at will. The reference is to an actual chalet in Switzerland he remembered fondly from his childhood. Judt completed The Memory Chalet in May of this year and died in August.

Born in London in 1948 to lower middle-class Jewish parents, Judt was early inclined toward solitude and scholarship. One of his youthful passions, he writes, was riding the Green Line buses from one side of London to the other “just for the sheer pleasure of seeing woods, hills, and fields emerge at each end of my native metropolis.” He was similarly enthusiastic about riding trains. Judt was educated at Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Although he was an ardent member of a leftist Zionist youth organization in the 1960s and worked summers on kibbutzim in Israel, he subsequently became a critic of Israel. “Before even turning twenty,” he declares, “I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a south London teenager.”

Judt would go on to teach history (a profession he began preparing for at the age of 12) at Cambridge and Oxford. He first came to America in 1975 to teach for a year at the University of California at Davis. He eventually settled permanently in the U.S. to continue the academic life at Berkeley and New York University.

Despite his stature as a “public intellectual,” Judt’s observations in this collection are more impressionistic than analytical. For the most part, he’s not arguing points but simply re-savoring the things that once pleased him, such as his comparatively lush life as a Cambridge undergraduate, the girls and music of the “Swinging Sixties,” his bracingly rigorous studies at the Ecole Normale and his drives across America. He even remembers the austere living conditions and the bad food of post-World War II Britain with surprising affection. Of his three marriages and two children, he says little. Nor does he dwell on friends or enemies he’s made. But he does pause to remark on what he considers “America’s three strongest assets”—Thomas Jefferson, Chuck Berry and the New York Review of Books.

Conceding that he can be stereotyped as English and/or Jewish, Judt spurns all the trappings of “identity” politics. “I prefer the edge,” he writes, “the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life.”  This is a memorable collection from a memorable man.

The new collection of essays by historian Tony Judt looks back on a life well and enjoyably lived—and one that was rapidly coming to a close. In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease—a condition that rapidly reduced him to a quadriplegic. Unable to…

Social Science

A voice from the past

Review by Edward Morris

Ben Franklin is worried. “My dear America may well have reached its majestic zenith,” he frets, “thus being poised to begin its slide from grace.” But the sage of Philadelphia is too constitutionally optimistic to succumb to despair. While he doesn’t propose an overall program to save the republic, he does offer some more of the common sense ideas he first put forth in his various editions of Poor Richard’s Almanack. Persnickety critics may kvetch that Franklin has been dead for 220 years and thus has no business sticking his disembodied nose into our peculiarly 21st-century problems. But they have not reckoned with the time-bridging skills of author Tom Blair, who channels herein both Franklin’s can-do spirit and his epigrammatic literary style.

Before he assumed this Founding Father mantle, Blair founded several companies, the most recent of which is Catalyst Health Solutions. This may help explain his skepticism toward the recently enacted national health-care bill, which his alter ego labels “both anemic and misengineered.” His is not a broadside, however. It’s more a probe into human nature and political realities.

Chief among our faux Franklin’s concerns are America’s enormous and escalating debt, the power Congress accords lobbyists and the privileged lifestyle (not a word he would use) that saps the strength and resolve of American citizens. He calls for a constitutional amendment that would require taxpayers to fund congressional political campaigns and thus do away with lobbyists. (After all, he notes, taxpayers already subsidize lobbyists—and at considerably greater expense.) As did his flesh-and-blood predecessor, the new Ben sometimes treads the peripheral. He devotes two pages to arguing that flag-burning should not be a First Amendment right—as if that activity has ever posed a danger—and he drolly asserts that the moment of conception occurs when a suitor “pulls the cork from the second bottle of Madeira.”

Like its 18th-century model, Poorer Richard’s America is fun to read and moderately thought-provoking. The sentences are straightforward and pithy, and the tone is gentle, even when it’s chiding something. Note the price “Ben” affixes to this book. Dead or alive, he always has a gimmick.

Ben Franklin is worried. “My dear America may well have reached its majestic zenith,” he frets, “thus being poised to begin its slide from grace.” But the sage of Philadelphia is too constitutionally optimistic to succumb to despair. While he doesn’t propose an overall program…

Animals

The Tiger

Review by Edward Morris

On a subfreezing night in early December 1997, a gigantic Amur tiger killed and devoured a beekeeper and hunter named Vladimir Markov just outside his cabin in a forest in the Russian territory of Primorye, near the borders of China and North Korea. This is the event around which John Vaillant’s The Tiger is coiled. Markov’s death activated a unit of the Russian conservation service known as Inspection Tiger, then headed by the dogged and charismatic ex-soldier Yuri Trush. It became Trush’s duty to track down and subdue the tiger before it killed again. In this, he failed, although there would be an ultimate face-to-face confrontation between the man and the beast.

“To properly appreciate such an animal,” Vaillant writes, “picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve. . . . Now, imagine the vehicle for all this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder.”

Vaillant unspools his story in several strands. In addition to giving an hour-by-hour account of the hunt, he also describes in considerable detail the landscape and history of this incredibly remote, exotic and inhospitable region. He explains the impact the breakup of the Soviet Union has had on efforts to conserve the tiger’s habitat and probes the mentality and motivation of those who wrest a living from this resource-rich—and thus endangered—frontier. Most absorbing, though, are Vaillant’s musings on whether this particular tiger sought out and attacked specific human beings as deliberate acts of revenge. Had the victims, in effect, courted their own destruction? This question leads to other discussions of how humans and animals behave toward each other in stressful environments.

As digressive and far-ranging as Vaillant’s narrative is, it never shifts for long from the tiger he has crouching at the edge of the reader’s imagination.

On a subfreezing night in early December 1997, a gigantic Amur tiger killed and devoured a beekeeper and hunter named Vladimir Markov just outside his cabin in a forest in the Russian territory of Primorye, near the borders of China and North Korea. This is…
HistoryAmerican History

Tragedy at Little Bighorn

Review by Edward Morris

The defeat of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry near the Little Bighorn River on June 25, 1876, has been so painstakingly chronicled and relentlessly mythologized that it’s hard to imagine anyone could find much new to say about it. And apart from providing a few fresh minor details, Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand doesn’t change the overall picture of the battle that has come down to us. Nor does he find Custer less arrogant and impulsive than a succession of other historians claimed him to be. Instead, Philbrick’s great service is to sift through the bounty of original sources from both sides of the fray, factor in recent forensic discoveries from the battlefield and emerge with a documentary-like narrative that has all the aspects of a Greek tragedy.

Essentially a washout at West Point but a valiant fighter for the Union in the Civil War, Ohio-born George Armstrong Custer soon enough found himself on the sword’s edge of Indian removal in the rapidly developing West, a task he relished. He was supported in his ambitions (which extended to the political and journalistic) by his doting wife, Elizabeth, who followed him to virtually every wilderness outpost.

Philbrick immerses the reader in the dull minutiae and stark terror of the battle at Little Bighorn, using the same close-up, minute-by-minute perspective he demonstrated in Mayflower and In the Heart of the Sea. He not only delves into the characters of Custer and his subordinate officers but also identifies by name and actions dozens of Lakota, Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho people who witnessed or fought alongside Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in the epic battle. Philbrick’s scholarship is equally epic; his appendices, notes and bibliography take up 135 pages, and he includes 18 maps. Like that of all historians, Philbrick’s account of Custer’s final hours rests on speculation. But it is well-informed and reasonable speculation—and immensely vivid.

 

The defeat of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry near the Little Bighorn River on June 25, 1876, has been so painstakingly chronicled and relentlessly mythologized that it’s hard to imagine anyone could find much new to say about it. And apart from providing a few fresh minor…

History

Misery and misrule in long-ago England

Review by Edward Morris

For 118 years, beginning with the ascent of Henry VII to the throne in 1485 and continuing through the sequential reigns of Henry VIII and his children, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, England suffered under the divisive, rapacious and bloody rule of the Tudors. While this era was underscored by Henry VIII’s legal and material dispossession of the Catholic Church in England, the Tudors further created misery, says G.J. Meyers, author of The Tudors, by engaging in profligate personal spending, fighting elective and wasteful wars and being actively hostile toward the plight of common citizens. Such advances as occurred in the theater, higher education and naval power happened, Meyer contends, in spite of the Tudors, rather than because of them.

So why are the Tudors so widely celebrated in virtually every medium from popular song to TV dramas? Why do many still regard Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603) as England’s Golden Age? Meyer argues that such mythmaking arose to aid descendants of the powerful ruling class Henry VIII created when he redistributed the Church’s vast wealth among his favorites. “No longer needing or willing to tolerate a monarch as overbearing as the Tudors had been at their zenith,” he says, “that new elite nevertheless continued to need the idea of the Tudors, of the wonders of the Tudor revolution, in order to justify its own privileged position. . . . Centuries of relentless indoctrination and denial ensued, with the result that England turned into a rather curious phenomenon: a great nation actively contemptuous of much of its own history.”

The story of Henry VIII’s serial marriages is well-known in its broader outlines and is, at first, almost comic to witness, as the king twists this way and that to appear a pious and dutiful Catholic while simultaneously seeking to satisfy his own considerable lusts. But the humor fades quickly. As his impatience grows at Rome’s unwillingness to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Henry finds it convenient to become, in effect, his own Pope, his own interpreter and executioner of God’s will. Once he reaches this stage, of course, Catholicism in England becomes ipso facto a religious affront and must be eradicated—along with the enormous holdings in land and property it has accumulated over the centuries.

Still, there is the sticky matter of turning the English masses (and his own children, for that matter) against the only Church they’ve ever known, and one that has reliably acted as a safety net for the poor. These are the seedbeds of “heresy” and rebellion that Henry VIII and his successors confront with such brutality and disregard for justice that one winces to read about it. Even under the comparatively gentle Queen Mary, who ruled for only five years, more than 300 people were barbarously executed, most of whom Meyer judges to have been “incapable of posing a threat to church or state.”

Meyer does a masterful job of delineating the ever-shifting lines of intrigue during the various Tudor reigns and of keeping tabs on a dizzying array of genetic, romantic and political relationships. He also provides crucial background chapters on Parliament, the English theater, village and monastic life, schools and schooling, John Calvin, the Tower of London, the Council of Trent and other significant entities and occurrences that stood apart from the English court even as they were affected by it.

Assiduously researched and laid out, The Tudors is hard-edged history without the beguiling romantic overlay. Meyer never renders his assessments vulnerable by falling in love with (or in awe of) the figures he chronicles, and his book is the better for it.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

For 118 years, beginning with the ascent of Henry VII to the throne in 1485 and continuing through the sequential reigns of Henry VIII and his children, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, England suffered under the divisive, rapacious and bloody rule of the Tudors. While…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Tales worthy of the great detective

Review by Edward Morris

Sherlock Holmes knew two things to be true: that noticing small, seemingly inconsequential details can lead one to larger discoveries, and that real life spawns situations more curious than mere fiction can. These concepts are the thematic backbone of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann’s collection of 12 previously published articles concerning the weird and the wonderful in human conduct. In each case, Grann brings a reporter’s eye and investigative tenacity to his subject. He is, in essence, both the probing Holmes and his dutiful note-taker, Dr. Watson.

Suitably enough, in his opening chapter, Grann takes the reader into the rarefied world of Sherlock Holmes scholars and enthusiasts who treat Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imaginary detective as if he had actually existed. Perhaps the most brilliant of these was Richard Lancelyn Green. Fascinated by the figure of Holmes since childhood, Green became an acknowledged expert on Doyle’s life and methods. He was trying desperately to prevent a treasury of Doyle’s papers from being auctioned off when, on the morning of March 27, 2004, police broke through the locked door of his London residence and “found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.” Murder or an elaborate suicide?

Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Lost City of Z, also chronicles another mysterious death in Poland and a novel that seems to bear on it. He examines the detective work that led to the prosecution of a man in Texas for killing his children in a house fire, comes face to face with leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and hangs out with a purported Haitian torturer. Then there are his tales of obsession—the adult Frenchman who repeatedly passed himself off as a child; the relentless searchers for giant squids; and the generations of “sand hogs” who keep New York’s water flowing.

The author’s dramatic pacing and attention to colorful details would make Dr. Watson proud. No doubt the persnickety Holmes would approve, too.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Sherlock Holmes knew two things to be true: that noticing small, seemingly inconsequential details can lead one to larger discoveries, and that real life spawns situations more curious than mere fiction can. These concepts are the thematic backbone of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David…

Social Science

What our roads reveal about us

Review by Edward Morris

The crucial matters of civilization, contends Ted Conover in The Routes of Man, invariably occur on and alongside roads, be they ground-based pathways or navigable rivers. Here is where cities are built, commerce conducted, cultures mingled, empires extended and invaders admitted. Just about every good thing a road enables is matched by something bad; the same route that conveys one’s goods to market can just as swiftly bring back disease and political disruption, or it can create a momentarily bustling economy at the expense of scarce natural resources.

To demonstrate the more particular consequences of modern roads, Conover invites the reader to accompany him on sometimes long and frequently hazardous journeys through Peru, the Himalayas, East Africa, the West Bank, China, Lagos and Nigeria. In Lagos, he hangs out with an ambulance crew stationed beside an incredibly clogged and robber-infested freeway. In China, he joins a rally of newly minted car enthusiasts for a weeklong excursion from Beijing to Hubei province. In the Himalayas, he trudges with villagers along the frozen river that is their only winter outlet to the outside world.

Conover rides “shotgun” in the West Bank with both Palestinian residents and the Israeli soldiers who patrol and monitor the region’s roads. Ubiquitous and maddeningly arbitrary in their operation, the soldiers’ checkpoints are an unrelenting source of frustration and humiliation to the Palestinians: “Most permit both vehicles and pedestrians to pass, but some allow only pedestrians. Some close at dusk and open at dawn. . . . Some allow anything to pass once the soldiers have left for the night. And some change the rules from day to day.”

Although the narrative occasionally gets bogged down in what appears to be detail for its own sake, The Routes of Man is an absorbing read. Conover may not reach any grand conclusions about the future of roads, but he does illuminate the myriad functions of these vital but underappreciated structures—not the least of which is their symbolic importance to the human race, which is constantly on the move. 

The crucial matters of civilization, contends Ted Conover in The Routes of Man, invariably occur on and alongside roads, be they ground-based pathways or navigable rivers. Here is where cities are built, commerce conducted, cultures mingled, empires extended and invaders admitted. Just about every good…

Memoir

The son his mother wanted

Review by Edward Morris

Southern literature is awash in stories about sensitive young boys with domineering mothers, dissolute fathers and quirky extended families. Malcolm Jones’ Little Boy Blues partakes of all these elements, but he doesn’t turn any of them into the usual cut-and-paste stereotypes.

Now a cultural critic for Newsweek, Jones writes of his early boyhood years in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and of the emotional pain and confusion his schoolteacher mother and alcoholic father incidentally inflicted on him. Jones was born in 1952, 10 years after his parents married. By the time he came along—he would be an only child—his father was already drinking heavily, unable to keep a job and often absent for long and unexplained periods. When Jones was 11, his parents divorced. His mother made the most of her “martyrdom,” always letting her “brave little man” know how much she depended on him to reflect well on her. Consequently, he grew up pretty much a loner. If there were best friends or wise teachers in whom Jones confided or found ongoing solace, he fails to mention them.

Instead, Jones turned to music, movies and television for comfort. He recalls being enraptured by an ancient Chris Bouchillon phonograph record he found at his grandmother’s house when he was five. Then there was the summer he spent with his father, during which they would sit together in the evening and watch the Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs TV show. Often he and his mother attended movies together, after which they would discuss them. But even here, her discontent and self-absorption always tainted the experience.

Jones writes with a curiously detached tone, almost as if he’s describing someone else, and he offers no happy ending, no moments of lightheartedness. Although he remained a dutiful son, the tension between who he was and who his mother wanted him to be never abated. She died in 2004, when she was 90. “My mother hated change, especially in me,” he concludes. “But that took years to figure out.”

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Southern literature is awash in stories about sensitive young boys with domineering mothers, dissolute fathers and quirky extended families. Malcolm Jones’ Little Boy Blues partakes of all these elements, but he doesn’t turn any of them into the usual cut-and-paste stereotypes.

Now a cultural critic for…

History

Sheehan’s fascinating portrait of the men who built the bombs

Review by Edward Morris

Just as he used the pivotal figure of John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie to tie together America’s myriad miscalculations in the Vietnam War, so Neil Sheehan focuses here on Bernard Schriever, another relatively unknown presence, to anatomize America’s arms race with Russia from the end of World War II through the mid-1960s.

A German by birth, “Bennie” Schriever came to the U.S. in 1917 when he was six years old. He grew up in San Antonio, earned a degree in construction engineering from Texas A&M and was commissioned into the fledgling Army Air Force in 1933. That same year he met Lt. Col. Henry “Hap” Arnold, a strong believer in the scientific development of weaponry. Schriever served in the Pacific during World War II, and in 1946, with the war over, Arnold appointed Schriever to serve as liaison between civilian scientists and the Air Force to develop new weapons systems. Although Schriever would rise in rank and responsibility, this essentially would be his mission until he left the service in 1966.

Sheehan argues that the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was predicated on an erroneous assessment of Joseph Stalin’s comparatively modest territorial ambitions. After Russia got the atomic bomb in 1949, however, the us-versus-them dynamic boiled out of control. Then the question became which side could deliver its A-bombs most effectively. Schriever’s nemesis in this calculation was Gen. Curtis LeMay, the man who had fire-bombed Japan into near submission before the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finished the job. LeMay’s solution was more, bigger and longer-range bombers, all carrying thermonuclear warheads—and a willingness to use them.

Since Russia couldn’t match the U.S. in number of A-bombs and planes, it turned its attention to long-range rockets. So did Schriever and his civilian teams. Much of Sheehan’s book concerns his circumventing or surmounting the political machinations, corporate greed and personal vanities that stood in the way of creating what would come to be called the “ICBM”— intercontinental ballistic missile—with the capability of delivering a targeted, nuclear-tipped rocket halfway around the world.

In telling his story, Sheehan profiles a gallery of fascinating characters, among them Paul Nitze (whose 1950 report to the National Security Council, Sheehan says, grossly overstated the Soviet threat); hawkish and brilliant mathematician John von Neumann; the Hall brothers, Ed and Ted, the former a member of Schriever’s first ICBM unit, the latter a spy for Russia who wasn’t unmasked until 1995; and Hitler’s morally accommodating rocket man, Wern-her von Braun, who was more interested in space travel than nuclear confrontation. In piecing this narrative together, Sheehan interviewed well over 100 sources, including Nitze, physicist and hydrogen-bomb pioneer Edward Teller, diplomat Richard Holbrooke and Schriever himself, who died in 2005. It is a dazzling display of scholarship.

To some, this book will be a triumphant tale of America once again winning the day, but to others it will read like a tragedy in which the brightest minds of a generation bent themselves to finding the best ways to slaughter people en masse.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Just as he used the pivotal figure of John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie to tie together America’s myriad miscalculations in the Vietnam War, so Neil Sheehan focuses here on Bernard Schriever, another relatively unknown presence, to anatomize America’s arms race with Russia…

Memoir

Bluegrass star recalls life on the road

Review by Edward Morris

In the tight-lipped tradition of Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley has been verbally parsimonious in disclosing details about his life and art—until now. Here he opens up, talking freely about his shadowy absentee father, his immensely gifted but hard-drinking older brother, Carter, and the heart-wrenching ordeal of trying to make a living playing a kind of music too few people wanted to hear.

Born in 1927 in southwestern Virginia, Stanley was steeped in ancient folksongs, hymns, parlor ballads and the sounds of a newer, jazzier string band music being perfected by the Kentuckian Bill Monroe, who dubbed this emerging genre “bluegrass.” The day he returned from military service in 1946, he and Carter formed the Stanley Brothers band with Carter as front man and chief songwriter. Over the next 20 years, the Stanley Brothers achieved a stature within the bluegrass community that rivaled Monroe’s.

Then, in 1966, Carter finally drank himself to death and in so doing thrust his younger brother into the spotlight. In that role, Stanley mentored such formidable young talents as Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley and Larry Sparks, even as he was carving out his own reputation as a stunningly emotional vocalist. Although long revered by bluegrass fans, Stanley didn’t become a superstar until he was featured on the soundtrack album for the Coen Brothers’ 2000 movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

His chilling a cappella rendition of “Oh Death” on that album won him a Grammy and sparked two successful arena tours.

As fascinating as Stanley’s personal revelations are, this book’s greatest value lies in his documentary-like descriptions of the hardships rural musicians faced in the 1940s and ’50s—crowded cars, band rivalries, long and dangerous roads and hand-to-mouth living. It’s little wonder then that Stanley can say at age 82, “I ain’t afraid to die, but I am scared of what would happen if my voice were to fail me . . . because singing is really all I’ve got to give anymore.”

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

In the tight-lipped tradition of Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley has been verbally parsimonious in disclosing details about his life and art—until now. Here he opens up, talking freely about his shadowy absentee father, his immensely gifted but hard-drinking…

Social Science

Journalist’s decade-long probe of the Columbine shootings

Review by Edward Morris

The massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, followed the usual media trajectory: first a flurry of fact-starved news bulletins; then a procession of eye-witness interviews, crime-scene photos and somber analyses; and, finally, the crystallization of the tragedy into a few memorable mythic figures and events.

To the degree that people remember Columbine at all, they are likely to recall that the two students who did the killings in that Colorado community—Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—were “outsiders” given to wearing black trench coats and intent on avenging themselves against those who had bullied them, particularly the school jocks. And they both suffered from bad parenting.

None of this is true. Both boys were intelligent, industrious, socially involved, generally well liked and more apt to bully than be bullied. They came from prosperous but not opulent two-parent homes, and their parents were attentive and supportive without being overly indulgent. The boys wore dusters, not trench coats, on the last day of their lives—not for dramatic effect but to conceal their weapons.
Within a span of 49 minutes, the young assassins slaughtered 15 people, including themselves. It wasn’t an act committed in rage: they had planned the assault for months. Nor were there specific targets in mind. If Harris had had his way, he would have obliterated everyone in the school (and the world); Klebold simply wanted to die.

Dave Cullen—whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon and other publications—began his coverage of the massacre the day it occurred. He’s stayed with the story ever since, fleshing out the actions and motives of the central characters, observing the effects the carnage had on the community, chronicling the ongoing failures of law enforcement and pinpointing flaws of the media. His writing has the immediacy and starkness of a documentary.

Cullen was aided mightily in his research by the abundant detritus of hate Harris and Klebold left behind to make sure the world appreciated the depth of their discontent. They spoke from the grave through journals and videotapes that did not become available to the public until long after the furor had subsided. In addition, there are more than 30,000 pages of evidence compiled by the police.
The one mystery Cullen fails to solve in Columbine—and he acknowledges as much—is why Harris and Klebold acted as they did. What was the source of Harris’ rage and Klebold’s despair? Cullen is convinced that Harris was a classic psychopath. But that only labels, it doesn’t explain. Cullen does demonstrate, however, that there were ample signs of Harris’ escalating malevolence that the police never acted on. For reasons both emotional and legal, neither set of parents has been open with the press, and the testimony they were finally persuaded to give in 2003 in private has been sealed by a judge until 2027.

As full and as fascinating as it is, Columbine is a deeply unsettling book because it confirms our worst fear: that evil can arise without apparent cause and strike without provocation.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

The massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, followed the usual media trajectory: first a flurry of fact-starved news bulletins; then a procession of eye-witness interviews, crime-scene photos and somber analyses; and, finally, the crystallization of the tragedy into a few memorable mythic…

NonfictionPolitics

A secret map of the world

Review by Edward Morris

The “blank spots” of the title of Trevor Paglen’s Blank Spots on the Map refer to America’s secret intelligence-gathering outposts—from unacknowledged air bases in the Southwest, to innocuous office buildings in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to disguised prisons in Afghanistan, to undeclared spy satellites circling overhead. Drawing on his reporting skills and training as a geographer, Paglen constructs both a history and a remarkably detailed outline of America’s “black” operations, many of which are now in the hands of profit-oriented private contractors who have no allegiance to the taxpayers who fund them—or to constitutional niceties.

Indeed, Paglen argues that government-sanctioned secrecy exacts a severe toll on America’s legal system. The Central Intelligence Act of 1949, he points out, exempts CIA funding from Congressional oversight in spite of the constitutional clause that mandates it. Now, Paglen asserts, the law has been stretched through state-secrecy arguments to embrace wiretapping of citizens without court approval, torture, “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners to other countries for interrogation, punishment and concealment and routine denial of due process.

“Creating secret geographies has meant erasing parts of the Constitution,” he says, “creating blank spots in the law . . . handing sovereign powers . . . to the executive branch . . . and turning our own history into a state secret.”

To document these conclusions, Paglen monitored (from a distance) secret sites from Las Vegas to Kabul; sifted through government and private documents and extrapolated the data found there; and enlisted the talents of an array of amateur researchers, including a zealous recorder and interpreter of satellite data in Toronto and a retired history professor in Hawaii who specializes in the privatization of intelligence gathering. Paglen engages in no UFO voodoo or conspiracy theories here. He’s just a concerned citizen doggedly attempting to gain relevant facts from a government now designed to conceal them.

Edward Morris gathers intelligence from Nashville.

The “blank spots” of the title of Trevor Paglen’s Blank Spots on the Map refer to America’s secret intelligence-gathering outposts—from unacknowledged air bases in the Southwest, to innocuous office buildings in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to disguised prisons in Afghanistan, to undeclared spy satellites…

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features