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Wright Thompson’s ‘The Barn’ chronicles the fight to preserve the memory of Emmett Till

Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
NonfictionMemoir

Connie

With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
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History

Communism was a red herring

Review by bookpagedev

Do we need another book about Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican senator (1947-1957) whose name marks a fearsome era in American history? Tom Wicker, a former editor at the New York Times, thinks so. McCarthy is best understood in the context of the Cold War, which began about the time he arrived in Washington. The Soviet Union, partner in the allied victory, had claimed sovereignty over eastern Europe. Mao Tse-Tung overran Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists and China had gone communist. It seemed that the red star was on the rise.

Gifted with energy, intelligence and pugnacity, McCarthy now saw a wondrous opportunity: anti-communism. His baseless charge of 205 communists in the State Department, made in February 1950, catapulted him to fame. For the next four years, he investigated communists wherever he imagined them the executive branch, the Democratic Party and, finally, the military. His goal was simply personal aggrandizement. In Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy, Wicker writes, He never uncovered much less sent to jail a single communist, in or out of government. Still, colleagues, presidents and press lords quailed before his popularity in the polls.

Wicker relates the familiar story of how McCarthy’s attack on the Army brought him down. It began with the efforts by his chief aide, Roy Cohn, to gain favor for Cohn’s homosexual lover, Pvt. G. David Schine. And it ended with the magnificent words of chief counsel to the Army, Joseph Welch, whose law partner McCarthy had smeared: Have you at long last, sir, no decency? The hearings were televised. As long as print covered the senator, he remained a popular idol; when people saw his sneer and heard his vicious words, he plummeted in esteem. Wicker’s book adds few facts to what’s known about McCarthy, but it provides a valuable analysis of how his popularity presented dilemmas for both parties in the early 1950s. And he acknowledges McCarthy’s genuine gifts, which, tragically, were used only to seek renown. James Summerville lives and writes in Dickson, Tennessee.

Do we need another book about Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican senator (1947-1957) whose name marks a fearsome era in American history? Tom Wicker, a former editor at the New York Times, thinks so. McCarthy is best understood in the context of the Cold War, which began about the time he arrived in Washington. The […]
NonfictionMemoir

Words are all she has

Review by bookpagedev

One morning more than five years ago, Diane Ackerman arrived in the high-tech cove of the local hospital to find her husband, the novelist Paul West, trailing so many tubes that he looked like a jellyfish. Fighting a systemic kidney infection, West had languished in the hospital bed for more than three weeks, but he brightened at Ackerman’s entrance. The couple playfully plotted his escape from the world of the sick and infirm and his return to their cozy world full of words and wonder at the marvels of nature in their rural New York home. Those bright hopes shattered when, after a long and arduous surgery, he suffered a stroke, losing all command of language, memory and muscular coordination—and needing her to nurse him back to wholeness.

Through her poignant memoir, One Hundred Names for Love, Ackerman guides us through the territory of anxiety and despair as she navigates the cartography of loss. As a poet and writer deeply in love with language, she feels viscerally the loss that her beloved must feel in the moments, days, months and even years after his stroke. After a couple of years, Ackerman feels as if she is becoming West’s coach, cheerleader, teammate, teacher, translator, best friend and wife all rolled into one. No one can play so many roles without burning out.

Yet in spite of her physical and mental fatigue, she lovingly continues to talk to, cajole and banter with West in the slow, demanding work of helping him to regain his use of language. A triumphant moment occurs when she asks him to make up some new pet names for her to replace the ones he has forgotten; almost immediately West calls her his “celandine hunter” and “swallow haven.” From those hours he begins to focus on his writing once again, recovering more steadily as he regains the ability to use language creatively rather than simply to name objects. Since his stroke, West has written his own memoir of the event (The Shadow Factory) along with essays and book reviews for publications like Harper’s.

Although Ackerman’s faith in West’s ability to regain language changed from moment to moment, her moving memoir captures her loving faith in the unerring power of words to heal her loved one’s broken soul and body.

 

One morning more than five years ago, Diane Ackerman arrived in the high-tech cove of the local hospital to find her husband, the novelist Paul West, trailing so many tubes that he looked like a jellyfish. Fighting a systemic kidney infection, West had languished in the hospital bed for more than three weeks, but he […]
NonfictionPolitics

The unmaking of a president

Review by bookpagedev

The days at issue here are those immediately following the resignation and departure from the White House of Richard Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, to succeeding president Gerald Ford’s controversial pardoning of him on Sept. 8. These were turbulent times, as Barry Werth points out in 31 Days, not simply because of the continuing Watergate scandal, but also because of a faltering national economy, rising oil prices, a potentially explosive clash between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, and the international and domestic fallout from the war in Vietnam.

Stepping into this morass was an undistinguished former congressman from Michigan whose fate it was to be struck twice by political lightning first, being elevated to the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign; then, ascending to the presidency when Nixon himself was toppled. During the transition, Ford had to cope with many Nixon holdovers, including the supremely ambitious Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Moreover, there was the lingering problem of what to do with his unrepentant predecessor.

Given such turmoil and the power vacuum it created, it was only natural that political opportunists would move in. Werth subtitles his book: The Crisis That Gave Us The Government We Have Today. At that time, George H.

W. Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee and eager to become Ford’s vice president (a post that ultimately went to Nelson Rockefeller); Donald Rumsfeld, who also aspired to the vice presidency, was ambassador to NATO; Richard Cheney was his deputy, later to be Ford’s chief of staff; Richard Perle was an aide to hawkish Democratic senator Henry Scoop Jackson; and Ronald Reagan was still governor of California. All these figures were considerably to the right of the congenitally moderate and accommodating Ford.

Initially, Ford’s openness and congeniality won over both the country and a Congress that was overjoyed to be rid of the tainted Nixon. But when Ford announced against the advice of many of his counselors that he was pardoning his predecessor, the honeymoon was over and the stage was set for his defeat three years hence by the upstart Jimmy Carter. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

 

The days at issue here are those immediately following the resignation and departure from the White House of Richard Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, to succeeding president Gerald Ford’s controversial pardoning of him on Sept. 8. These were turbulent times, as Barry Werth points out in 31 Days, not simply because of the continuing Watergate […]
NonfictionHistory

Undercover lovers

Review by bookpagedev

Jennet Conant is a genius at finding significant World War II-era stories that have largely gone untold or unnoticed in the more comprehensive chronicles of that period. As the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, the eminent chemist, statesman and longtime president of Harvard University, she has had particular access to the behind-the-scenes workings of history. From that access have come the dramatic and well-documented narratives Tuxedo Park, 109 East Palace and The Irregulars.

Now Conant is back with A Covert Affair, an equally readable account of larger-than-life Julia Child and her husband, Paul Child—not as culinary pioneers, but in their earlier incarnations as information-gatherers and propagandists for the World War II intelligence network, the Office of Strategic Services. Fascinating as these two figures are, though, the book’s real focal point is their good friend, the daring and alluring socialite and spy Jane Foster.

Julia and Jane were both from wealthy, conservative families in California; Paul, who was 10 years older than Julia, grew up relatively poor in Boston. Idealists all, they volunteered for the war effort and initially served together in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), working in league with the British. Later, in various configurations, they would continue their government services in Indonesia, China and Vietnam. An impulsive do-gooder, Foster grew incensed that the Dutch, French and English were intent on reasserting their colonial claims in the East once the Japanese were driven out. After the war ended, she argued eloquently and publicly on behalf of the Indonesian resistance movement—one of many political indiscretions that would come back to haunt her when the American government embarked on its witch hunt for Communists.

Conant devotes the last half of her book to showing how the Childs were caught up in Senator McCarthy’s red-baiting. Both were indignant at what they perceived as Foster’s persecution, and both spoke out in her defense, even when evidence filtered in that she might be more culpable in spying for Russia than she admitted. As Foster’s star was sinking, the irrepressible Julia’s was rising. After the war, she took cooking classes to impress hard-to-snare Paul—they were finally married in 1946—then expanded her studies when they were posted to France. By the time Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961 to near-universal acclaim, Foster was living in exile in Paris, embittered, separated from her old friends and contemplating the enormous costs of her political sympathies. Conant’s account of the three friends’ stories is another masterpiece of historical reporting.

 

Jennet Conant is a genius at finding significant World War II-era stories that have largely gone untold or unnoticed in the more comprehensive chronicles of that period. As the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, the eminent chemist, statesman and longtime president of Harvard University, she has had particular access to the behind-the-scenes workings of history. […]
History

Where country has always been cool

Review by Edward Morris

Visitors new to Nashville are invariably surprised at how small, compact and unassuming the area known as Music Row is. Roughly three streets wide and eight blocks long, it still looks more like a residential neighborhood than a multibillion-dollar entertainment capital. Housed within this deceptive geography are major record companies, music publishers, talent managers, booking agencies, entertainment lawyers, recording studios, trade organizations and kindred enterprises.

In How Nashville Became Music City, U.S.A., Michael Kosser, a veteran Nashville journalist and songwriter, set out to tell Music Row's story while there were still people around who remembered how it all got started. Although Nashville had been a country music stronghold since the launching of the Grand Ole Opry radio show there in 1925, it wasn't until the early 1940s that a cohesive music industry began to form. By the end of World War II, things started buzzing in Nashville. Then, in 1955, as Kosser relates, brothers Owen and Harold Bradley, both established musicians, built a tiny recording studio on 16th Avenue South. This was the seed from which Music Row grew. Owen went on to produce such enduring acts as Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn and K.D. Lang. Harold became one of the most recorded session guitarists of all time.

Instead of giving readers a dry linear history of The Row, Kosser provides a textured, anecdotal one, woven from his easygoing interviews of more than 60 seminal figures. (To keep them all clear in the reader's mind, he lists and identifies them at the start of his chronicle.) Among the people who recalled for him the old days are Harold Bradley, now the head of the local musician's union (Owen died in 1998); Buddy Killen, who toured with the great Hank Williams before becoming a publishing mogul; and Bob Doyle, who quit a good job to take his chances at managing a kid named Garth Brooks. A master storyteller himself, Kosser knows the power of a good yarn to bring history alive. As informal as it is, this book is a historical landmark. The accompanying CD includes 12 classic songs recorded on Music Row.

Edward Morris is a former country music editor of Billboard.

 

Visitors new to Nashville are invariably surprised at how small, compact and unassuming the area known as Music Row is. Roughly three streets wide and eight blocks long, it still looks more like a residential neighborhood than a multibillion-dollar entertainment capital. Housed within this deceptive geography are major record companies, music publishers, talent managers, booking […]
MusicArts & Culture

Neil Young: take a look at his life

Review by bookpagedev

It can be fairly argued that only three rock icons from the hippy-dippy ’60s have really endured: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, who is the subject of the massive, keenly detailed and anecdote-laden authorized biography Shakey.

With style and intelligence, veteran music journalist Jimmy McDonough tells the amazing tale of Young’s emergence from the Canadian folkie scene into the wild post-Beatles, pre-psychedelic mayhem of mid-1960s L.A., where he first made his mark as a member of the legendary (and legendarily dysfunctional) pop-rock group Buffalo Springfield. Hailed as a songwriter of genius, Young struggled a bit thereafter, mostly in the face of criticism of his reedy, strangely iconoclastic vocal stylings. Yet a string of groundbreaking solo albums Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest were followed by a highly publicized stint as a member of the acclaimed Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and superstardom was his, with all the attendant professional madness and personal heartache. While most of Young’s contemporaries dropped off the industry road map due to natural attrition, he continued to produce music through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, building new audiences and maintaining a touring presence while also retooling his act through seemingly unlikely alliances with bands such as Devo and Pearl Jam.

McDonough’s analysis of Young’s musical vision and brilliance is matched with fascinating insights into the life of a man who has certainly experienced his share of physical and psychic pain his parents’ early breakup, childhood polio, extended bouts with epilepsy, failed relationships and marriages (including his very public liaison with actress Carrie Snodgrass), the premature deaths of musical friends from drug overdoses, and the birth of a son with cerebral palsy.

On the surface, Young has always been perceived as a somewhat frail, introspective and private individual. Yet, if nothing else, McDonough’s exhaustive, eminently readable account serves as testament to one man’s abilities to survive the dog-eat-dog music business and triumph through his art.

It can be fairly argued that only three rock icons from the hippy-dippy ’60s have really endured: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, who is the subject of the massive, keenly detailed and anecdote-laden authorized biography Shakey. With style and intelligence, veteran music journalist Jimmy McDonough tells the amazing tale of Young’s emergence […]

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