*****The Cowboy and the Cossack

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Cowboy and the Cossack, Clair HuffakerBy Clair Huffaker, narrated by Phil Gigante. I loved this!! It’s one of Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscovery novels—books she believes are out of print and shouldn’t be. If this one is an indication, the whole list deserves to be checked out.

The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) is the story of 15 Montana cowboys and a herd of 500 longhorn cattle who travel by ship to Vladivostok and embark on a journey across the Siberian wilderness en route to the small town of Bakaskaya where the people are desperate to have them. Unexpectedly, when they arrive in Russia, they’re met for the trip by a troop of elite Cossack horsemen. The cowboys, under the leadership of laconic Shad Northshield, don’t want or need their help. Or so they think.

But what they think doesn’t matter, because the Cossack leader, Captain Rostov, is every bit the stubborn leader Northshield is. Told through the eyes of a young cowboy named Levi Dougherty–and Gigante’s perfect narration–the novel is a coming-of-age story, a “when men were men” Western, and a thrilling adventure. It’s told in the appropriately colorful language of a young man of the 1880’s, which adds to the realism. Levi struggles to see the multiple points of view of the two cultures—and the men in them—thrown together in extreme and life-threatening circumstances.

Clair Huffaker, who died in 1990, wrote more than a dozen Western and other novels, as well as screenplays (including The Comancheros and Rio Conchos) and for the television series, Lawman. Huffaker’s daughter has written about the significance of having this book dedicated to her, and among her thoughtful comments is this: “It is a profound honor for me to (invite) new readers into an epic adventure tale which at its core illuminates the essential traits that my father believed a true man should steadfastly possess: honor, courage, integrity, and quiet strength.”


Comment from reader Nancy Kaminsky: “I am half way through reading The Cowboy and the Cossack per your recommendation. I love this book. The writer’s descriptions are so vivid. Thanks for your review. It may be the best book that I have ever read.”

****As Texas Goes . . .

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Texas, farm, road

(photo by Carol Von Canon, creative commons license)

By Gail Collins – This funny-but-serious political analysis is a good, quick read. The book came about when Collins realized that “Without anyone much noting it,” Texas has “taken a starring role in the twenty-first-century national political discussion.” Certainly, it has produced a goodly number of memorable politicians in the last quarter-century: Phil Gramm, Tom DeLay, Dick Armey, up-and-comer John Cornyn, Ron Paul, Karl Rove, Rick Perry, ex-President Bush II, and the inimitable H. Ross Perot.

The state has had outsized influence in many spheres, says Collins in As Texas Goes…, subtitling her book “How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda.” On prosperity: the 2008 economic meltdown was largely the result of financial deregulation inspired by Phil Gramm. On education: although its influence on school textbook content across the nation may be waning, the Texas State Board of Education’s past actions promoted its conservative, anti-scientific, and ahistorical views on a generation of Americans. (At one point, the Board included a member “who believed public schools are the tool of the devil,” Collins reports.) On national energy policy: the state’s representatives, attuned to the needs of the local oil and gas industry, shape national energy policy and denigrate global warming. And, as the New York Times review picked out, Texas leaders have been “entangling us in an occasional war.”

Collins’s theory about the source of Texans’ attitudes are illuminating. “You have to start with the great, historic American division between the people who live in crowded places and the people who live in empty places.” In crowded places, you need rules to protect you from other people’s intrusive behavior; in empty places, you do not. In fact, you don’t want government rules and programs. Tom DeLay was once asked whether there were any government regulations worth keeping, he said, “None that I can think of.” That’s empty-space thinking. And, she says, “The current Tea Party strain in the Republican party is all about the empty-place ethos.”

Ironically, Texans holds fast to their empty-place perspective, even though eight out of 10 of them live in a major population area. Six of the nation’s 20 largest cities are in Texas. Most Americans probably consider Fort Worth no more than an upstart cousin of Dallas, but its population is larger than that of Seattle, Boston, or Denver.

If you want to read about outsize personalities who sometimes need to lasso it in, and how the country got to where it is in important policy areas, you might enjoy this entertaining and well-researched book. “Don’t mess with Texas” began as an anti-littering campaign slogan, but it’s taken on a larger life and now may need a coda: “but Texas is messing with you.”

Map Out Your Holiday Gifts

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map, Paris

(photo: author)

OK, Santas’ helpers, if someone on your list loves New York, loves maps, loves travel, or just loves to get down with the details, that person might enjoy this wildly popular book of personal maps: Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers, by Becky Cooper, illustrated by Bonnie Briant, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik. Pointing to this book as a bellwether, The Guardian says hand-drawn maps are in. So much so, their creators even have their own association. “All maps tell stories,” Cooper says, and proves it with the creative contributions in this very book.

Alternatively, The Guardian story says Wellingtons Travel spent three years creating a map of modern London full of hand-drawn charm, using the 1800s style that shows individual trees and buildings. The photograph accompanying this article is similar to the Wellingtons approach, but it’s a portion of a map of Paris from a favorite poster of mine that’s so realistic, I’m sure I can pick out that little hotel I stayed at near L’Etoile.

Many people have participated in Cooper’s Mapping Manhattan project, contributing their own unique memory portraits, like the map of “My Lost Gloves.” (That one is available as a print from Uncommon Goods, which has an array of intriguing map gift ideas, including the “Single Malts of Scotland” or “Great Wines of France” tasting maps—bases for a couple of good tours, there.) Contribute to the collective mental map of the city by downloading a blank map of Manhattan on which to show the places where you took your own favorite bites out of the Big Apple. Download another and stick it in your love’s Christmas stocking.

Begin Again

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Mark Ruffalo & Keira Knightley, Begin Again

Mark Ruffalo & Keira Knightley

Writer-director John Carney’s Begin Again (trailer) is a music business movie that pushes the questionable idea that Talent Will Out—here, the talent-spotting talent of Mark Ruffalo as an out-of-luck music producer and the singer-songwriter talent of, unexpectedly, Keira Knightley. Knightley is less believable than the scruffy Ruffalo, but this is her least self-conscious performance I’ve seen.

The music-making partnership between them could easily devolve into cliché, but I’m glad to say it escapes that trap, as they set up shop in various outdoor Manhattan locations to record the tracks of her possible breakout album. Meanwhile, he defends her potential to his former recording-company partner, enjoyably played by Mos Def.

Both lead characters are separated from their significant others—Knightley from her success-obsessed boyfriend, played by real-life music star Adam Levine, and Ruffalo from his wife, played by Catherine Keener in too small a role. Everyone learns who they are. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ and audience ratings:  83%.

***Blood, Bones & Butter

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Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood Bones & Butter

(photo: author)

By Gabrielle Hamilton – An engaging memoir that chronicles the author’s intense relationship with food, from her upbringing with a French mother and artist/set designer father, her falsifying her age to work in New Jersey kitchens starting at age 14, her drug-riddled stints as a bar waitress and catering kitchen dynamo, to the opening of her own restaurant in the East Village. That restaurant became the mini-phenomenon known as Prune, helped bring home-style cooking into vogue. In 2011, Hamilton received the James Beard award as New York City’s best chef.

The book describes Hamilton’s difficult relations with her mother and husband, but it’s never clear what the source of these difficulties is, why the relationships deteriorated as they did, or, rather, why she let them drift. Her essential alone-ness appears to be the strongest strain in her character.

I enjoyed this book’s lack of typical foodie descriptions, though it is over-the-top in its own way, determined not to, ahem, sugar-coat kitchen proceedings. She’s a compelling writer, with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and winner of the James Beard book award for writing and literature in 2012. Power on the page gets you past some of the unsavory spots, and it was well received. Legendary chef Anthony Bourdain calls the book “simply the best memoir by a chef ever.”

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“Where the West Begins”

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Fort Worth, Chisholm Trail

(photo: author)

Just back from a week in Fort Worth, Texas. Enough fun to make any Easterner sit high in the saddle and holler “Yee-haw!” When friends heard where I was spending Thanksgiving, the universal response was either “Where?” or “Why?” Now I’m here to tell you. It’s a vacation you might enjoy, too. Fort Worth has its own running “w” brand, but it could just as easily be the 5-C’s: cowboys, chow, culture, characters, and community.

Just to remind you, in 1849, Fort Worth was established as an actual fort, one of a string of outposts at the very edge of the Wild West, meant to protect settlers after the Mexican-American War. Soon “civilization,” such as it was, moved westward, and the fort was abandoned (now the site is occupied by the Beaux Arts Tarrant County Courthouse). A town grew up around the place on the Trinity River that was so well suited to watering and grazing livestock for a few days before the long trek north to market along the Chisholm Trail, and while the cows rested up, the cowboys made the best use of the neighborhood called “Hell’s Half Acre.”

Cowboys

Unique to Fort Worth is the stockyards area, much of which has been preserved as a tourist attraction, where once literally millions of beeves, sheep, and pigs were housed, awaiting their trips that end at our dinner tables. At first, cowboys drove the longhorn cattle north to slaughter, to feed Easterners’ desire for beef after the Civil War. Then the railroads came and made transportation faster. Then the big meat processors—Swift and Armour—decided to build factories right there and save the animals the trip.

cowboy boots

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Several museums and walking tours describe the cowboy way of life, including a fine exhibit of beautifully maintained wagons. Shops of cowboy and cowgal gear, too, including drool-worthy boots.

In keeping with the cowboy theme, we attended an initial National Cutting Horse Association World Championship Futurity round at the Will Rogers Coliseum. Despite having no idea how such an event is scored, we spent a morning spellbound, seeing these talented horses and their riders separate a cow from the herd and keep it from doing what it most wants to do—rejoin its companions. Lightning reflexes, flawless technique, intensive training, and inbred determination.

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame (photo: author)

Must mention the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, about the women who’ve participated in rodeo events, trick riding, barrel-racing, sharp-shooting (Annie Oakley!), as well as the Romance of the West (Dale Evans!!). (The horse-head detail is from a column in this museum.) Beautifully put together exhibits in an Art Deco building in the Cultural District.

Chow

With all this stockyards-walking, museum-going, and cow-watching, a gal’s gotta eat. What can you get, besides Tex-Mex? Steak. Big and delicious. Hickory Bar-B-Que in Bonham, Texas (why Bonham? Answer next week). Chicken-fried steak, a personal favorite, at Cowtown Diner, where the wry humor of our server-manager-barman provided unexpected entertainment. Saint-Emilion—Le restaurant Français de Fort Worth. Great wines, excellent food! Not a bad meal on the whole trip.

It’s always great to leave a place feeling there’s more to see and do, and that’s how we left Fort Worth! Culture, Characters, and Community next week!

Concrete Images: Emotional Impact

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wasp

(photo: Serena Epstein, Creative Commons)

Author John Thornton Williams, writing a recent Glimmer Train essay about his strategy for connecting readers with characters, touches on “one of the most important accomplishments of fiction” and one of the trickiest. Certainly writers receive plenty of advice not to come right out and say, “Mary was angry that Bethany was flirting with Ben” or “Dan felt sad when his dog died.” First of all, those feelings are pure obvious, given the situation, and second, naming a feeling doesn’t make the reader feel it.

An alternative, which Williams terms “a lengthy expository digression into the psyche of a character, perhaps accompanied by physical cues,” like “his stomach was in a knot, his throat was on fire,” he says, “generally proves detrimental to how I experience the story at hand.” It distracts him from the narrative, rather than immersing him in it. Or, as Donald Maass says, in Writing 21st Century Fiction, “when you supply everything readers are supposed to feel, they may wind up feeling little at all.”

Williams makes a third choice, especially for a story’s crisis moments, when emotions run highest and, often, at cross-purposes. He calls this approach “indirection of image.” To accomplish this, he takes into account how his characters would see a situation, based on their emotional state. “Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted,” he says.

His example recalls a favorite exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: “Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.” This exercise is many times harder than it might appear, and it’s perfect practice for the “indirection of image” approach Williams recommends.

Indirection of image, he says, “is a way to take abstract emotions and project them onto something concrete.” This actually expresses our lived experience. How many times has a car or a piece of furniture or a particular shirt become more significant in our minds because of its symbolic association with a whole range of emotions, beyond what we can tease out and easily express? Our childhood home. The ghastly color of its bathroom tile. The relentless ticking of the mantelpiece clock. A dead wasp.

By giving readers space to project their own emotions into the situation, by leaving a little ambiguity, readers can experience the emotion on a level that connects with their own experience, Williams says. They can, in other words, get inside the character. Here’s a link to one of his stories.

Will Men Read My Book?

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reading

(photo: Nico Cavallotto, Creative Commons)

Something else to worry about on the rocky road to publication: The Goodreads analysts have crunched the site’s numbers to explore the reading habits of their male versus female members. You can see the results in this nifty Infographic. My home page includes a button indicating I’m a member of Sisters in Crime, started by women crime and suspense writers who thought 20 years ago (and still do) that women crime writers get the short end of the stick in book reviews and other ways. The text of the Goodreads post says that’s still true for book reviews generally.

Key messages from the Infographic: women are twice as likely as men to read a recent book, and men are twice as likely to write (is that a typo?) a 500+-page book. In the first year after a book is published, a male writer’s audience will split 50-50 along gender lines, whereas a woman writer’s audience will be 80 percent female.

This new finding tracks with a 2005 study that found four out of five men (academics, critics, and writers) said the last novel they’d read had a man as author, whereas women in the study were equally likely to have most recently read a novel written by a man or a woman. Whatever they read in 2014, according to Goodreads, men and women both rated the books by women a bit higher.

A 2012 Wall Street Journal article quoted a Penguin editor as saying: “For a new author, we want to avoid anything that might cause a reader to put a book down and decide, ‘not for me.’ When we think a book will appeal to male readers, we want everything about the book to say that—the cover, the copy and, yes, the author’s name.” Which is why we had J.K., not Joanne Rowling. And why women still write under men’s—or at least ambiguous—names. [For a survey of this and other types of literary masquerade, try Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms.]

Finally, Goodreads looked at the 50 books published in 2014 that men most often read, and found that only five were by women. Three of these fall into the fantasy-science-fiction-dystopia world of teen lit, one is young adult, and the last—The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is a feel-good tale about a bookstore owner for whom everything looks grim, but then “magically” becomes more than OK (judging by the blurb). Go ahead, call me a snob, but I laughed out loud when I read the tagline for one of the fantasy books: “Erchomai, Sebastian had said. I am coming.”

Similarly, of the 50 books published in 2014 most often read by women, only five were by men (that is, if you count J.K. Rowling’s Robert Galbraith persona). The books by men that women mostly read were young adult fantasy, adventure fantasy, Galbraith’s The Silkworm, Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes, and a book I read and liked, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.

If you’re wondering, out of the 41 books I’ve read so far this year, 29 (71 percent) are by men—partly reflecting my genre reading choices (mystery, thriller). So, what about your reading, and do you (know you) care whether the author is a man or woman?

Elena Kagan

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Elena Kagan

Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan with President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden (photo: wikimedia.org)

Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Elena Kagan, a graduate of Princeton University’s Class of ʼ81, spoke informally yesterday with University President Christopher L. Eisgruber. Unlike the other Ivy schools, Princeton doesn’t have a school of law (or medicine), and Kagan obtained her legal training at Harvard Law, where she was later the school’s first female dean. Nevertheless, she told the crowd filling Richardson Auditorium that “whatever I learned about writing, I learned here.”

Eisgruber, also a lawyer (University of Chicago), asked Kagan about rumors she goes hunting with Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. It dates back, she says, to her pre-confirmation interviews with Senators in 2010. Since they couldn’t ask her directly what she believes about specific cases and laws, they resorted to indirect stratagems to feel her out. A western Senator asked, “Do you hunt?” She explained she was from New York City. “Do you know anyone who does hunt?” Not that, either. But she promised that, if confirmed, she’d have “Nino” take her. In 82 interviews, “It was the only promise I made,” she said.

In her judicial decision-making, she said she often returns to the intent of the framers, but that can lead to untenable results in the modern world. She also looks at judicial history over time, “thinking hard” about the precedents for a case. The part of the work she enjoys most is when there is an opportunity for influencing opinion, and the Justices are arrayed around their conference table, trying to sway one another by making strong arguments.

As to the 5-4 split decisions for which the current Court is known, she said 60% of the Court’s decisions are unanimous. Most of the disagreements have to do with how people read some of the law’s and Constitution’s most abstract provisions, and they come about, not because the Court has blind spots in certain areas—gender politics being suggested as one possibility by an audience questioner—but because there are strong arguments on both sides of a question that represent a real clash of values.

Eisgruber asked how she likes being an Associate Justice, and she said “Great gig!”

***The Orphan Train

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Orphan Train

Orphan train flyer, 1910 (photo: wikimedia)

By Christina Baker Kline – This book tells an interesting story, two of them, in fact. The modern-day story is about foster child Molly, goth makeup and hair, piercings, who has trouble fitting in with the multiple families she’s rotated through. Not an orphan, her mother’s persistent drug abuse has made Molly a ward of the state of Maine. When she steals a copy of Jane Eyre from the library, she receives the surprisingly harsh punishment (reading ought to be encouraged, one would think, the classics especially!), of 50 hours of community service.

The job she finds is helping 91-year-old Vivian clean her attic, but it turns out Vivian doesn’t really want to discard anything; the tidying up is an excuse for her to revisit the boxes of memories hidden away up there, some of which she hasn’t touched literally or emotionally in decades. Vivian, it turns out, was one of the 200,000 abandoned, homeless, or orphaned children transported on the “orphan trains” from the East Coast to the Midwest during a 75-year period between 1854 and 1929. Many found loving homes, many others found conditions of neglect and near-slavery. It was a confusing, uncertain, and frightening time for them. (The orphan trains were the subject of an American Experience documentary, also, if you’d like to learn more about this topic.)

For both Molly and Vivian, growing up had its perils, though the advantages they had in sheer intelligence may have set them apart from other children in similar difficult situations. They both have secrets and have to learn to trust each other, if they are ever to be able to share them. A quick read.