MarysLibrary

Ticket to Ride

Isabella lent me her copy of Larry Kane's book, Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles' 1964 and 1965 Tours that Changed the World (2003.) Kane was a little older than the typical Beatles fan and considered himself a serious news man, so when he was invited to accompany the Beatles on their first US tour in 1964 he went along somewhat reluctantly.

For the first 24 hours he was reluctant. After that he fell in love with the Beatles like almost everyone else in America and proceeded to have the time of his life. He was there for all the record-breaking concerts, he interviewed the fab four every day. He got to know them well, as only somebody who spent 16 and 18 hours a day with them could do. He learned who was afraid of flying (George), who had the sunniest disposition (Ringo), and who had an eye for the girls (George, Paul, Ringo, and John. Also Larry Kane.)

In 1964 I was too busy studying and working and planning and struggling to understand the Beatles phenomenon. Having no TV, radio, or record player kept me somewhat isolated from the excitement. But I did see them in their famous Ed Sullivan performance and who could resist?

We are all Beatles fans now and so the book kept my interest although after a while the concerts and their serious and sometimes dangerous security problems began to sound much alike. The book has a CD with it on which are many of Kane's interviews with the Beatles and that was fun to listen to.

This isn't the greatest book about rock music in the 1960s, but it's fun and has a lot of charm. Kane is still in the news business; he's now a host on a Philadelphia TV station.

Res Ipsa Loquitor

The facts speak for themselves.

Mrs Darcy's Dilemma

I read about Mrs Darcy's Dilemma by Diana Birchall (2008) in a book blog recently so one day when I was ordering some other books from amazon.com I added it to my shopping cart. I'm a sucker for a good cover and as you can see this book has a very good cover. I put the book aside for just the right moment, the literary equivalent of a rainy day. As I finished volume two of the Robert Caro biography of Lyndon Johnson, for a total of 1,388 pages, it seemed a bit rainy on the reading front so I picked up Birchall's book. Good move.

It's a pastiche, and I love well-done pastiche. This is very well done indeed. It's 25 years after Pride and Prejudice and Mr and Mrs Darcy have three children, including an elder son, Fitzwilliam, who is a thick-headed, dog-loving rider to hounds who would no more read a book than he would play chess. He is a disappointment to Elizabeth and Darcy, but not so disappointing as Jane and Bingley's son, Jeremy, who is a profligate playboy. The Darcys' other two children, Henry, a second son who is much like his father and is destined for the church, and a daughter, Jane, who is lovely and at 17 about to "come out," are much more satisfactory.

Christmas is coming and Elizabeth has invited the usual family and friends to Pemberly for the holidays including the Collinses, Lady Catherine, and Mr and Mrs Clarke (Mrs Clarke is the former Kitty Bennet.) In a generous gesture she invites Lydia's two oldest daughters to visit as well. Big mistake. The oldest girl, Bettina, is without taste or manners. The younger sister, Cleo, is lovely and clever, so much so that Elizabeth cannot imagine how she turned out so well with Lydia for a mother. One day soon after the Wickham girls arrive Lydia herself turns up. Bettina makes a big play for Fitzwilliam with her mother's encouragement and when Mr Darcy warns his son not to entangle himself with the girl - well! You won't believe what happens.

Meanwhile, Henry has fallen in love with Cleo, who has decided she must offer herself as a governess since she finds it impossible to force herself to go home and she knows she is out of place at Pemberly. The Collins family is in need of a governess - but will Lady Catherine approve of the child of Wickham and Lydia being in charge of the tender little Collinses?

And on it goes. The novel is wonderfully evocative of Austen's style and characters, and if it's perhaps a tad overplotted, so what? It will charm Janeites. Thank you, whoever you are who recommended the book!

Mark, the Match Boy

Horatio Alger, pictured at left, is an American Institution, the author of many novels, all with the same uplifting plot: poor boy makes good, rags to riches, pluck and luck, it's dogged as does it. If you read them at a rate of about one every 10 years they can be fun.

Ten years has rolled around since I read Struggling Upward, so I was comfortable reading Mark, the Match Boy (1869), which is another of the 100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read.

The plot is easy to grasp. The scene is New York City in the middle of the 19th century. A man from Milwaukee mentions to Richard (whose adventures were chronicled in Ragged Dick) that he disowned his daughter a dozen or so years before for marrying a man of whom he disapproved and now he regrets it. He has learned that his daughter is dead and he wants to find his grandson. Richard and a friend agree to try to find the lad.

They find him. This is not a spoiler because in Horatio Alger no well-meaning wish goes unfulfilled, no deserving lad goes unrewarded, and no hero fails to achieve his goal. The lad had changed his name (for reasons that I couldn't fathom, but what the heck) so Richard doesn't recognize that the hungry and ailing young man whom he takes in and supports and for whom he finds a good job turns out to be . . . yup, Mark, the Match Boy.

Horatio Alger books are more interesting to me for the sociology they convey than the stories, as much fun as a good rags to riches story can be. Like the religious romances of Grace Livingston Seagull (er, Hill), they tell us about what the lower middle class aspired to in those days at the end of the 19th century. On the whole, judging from Alger and Hill, it was a decent if modest prosperity, respect from the community, and a feeling of deserved self worth. Who could argue with that?

Politics Lost

Joe Klein, a respected columnist for Time Magazine, started out as a liberal and is now a moderate. This is to the benefit of his readers as it makes him one of the most truly unbiased political analysts out there these days as well as one of the most knowledgeable and entertaining. Many people know him because of his satirical roman a clef, Primary Colors, in which he anonymously skewered Bill Clinton and his campaign for president in 2000. He is, by the way, an admirer of Clinton's political skills.

Klein's Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid (2006) has nudged out Robert Novak's Prince of Darkness to become the best political memoir I've read in the last few years. From his first campaign in 1972 to the 2004 Bush-Kerry contest, Klein has been watching and learning, interviewing people and following their careers, and making up his mind about what he thinks our country needs in the way of political leadership.

And who are these people who think the voter is stupid? Campaign managers, media advisers, pollsters, speech writers, consultants. He describes the Gore and Kerry presidential bids and the deleterious effect advisers had on both campaigns, refusing to let the candidates be themselves, to talk about the things that mattered most to them. It was his advisers who decided he didn't need to respond to the scurrilous Swift-Boat attacks that sank Kerry's hopes of becoming president. It was advisers who refused to allow Gore to talk about the environment.

I'm looking forward to Klein's next book about politics, fiction or nonfiction. He's a winner.

Let's Talk About It - Jewish Literature

The American Library Association and Nextbook have been sponsoring a series of lectures on Jewish Literature at my local library for four or five seasons. Last fall's lecture series was called "A Mind of Her Own" and the theme was fathers and daughters in the Jewish American immigrant experience. The books we read are:

• Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem (written 1894-1916)
• Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1925)
• O My America by Johanna Kaplan (1980)
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)
• The Bee Season by Myla Goldberg (2000)

Tevye is a series of stories, a novel really, on which Fiddler on the Roof was loosely based. Tevye dearly loves his daughters and wants to do the best he can for them but conditions for Jews in Russia at the turn of the last century made everything more difficult. As the stories progress everything deteriorates and the family has less and less to cling to. The novel is much more profound than the musical, which was perceptive enough.

Yezierska's Bread Givers is about an immigrant family living on the lower east side in New York. The father, who was a respected scholar in the old country, is struggling to maintain authority over his daughters. He spends all his time studying while the women work to support the family. The men the father chooses as husbands for the older girls are a disaster and so the youngest girl goes out on her own, determined to get an education and become a teacher. This was more or less the experience of the author and her family. It's a wonderful book, very sad, but with a hopeful ending.

I didn't like O My America at all. It takes place in New York in the 1940s and the 1960s and tells the story of a political gadfly, Ezra Slavin, who is a sociopath. The world revolves around him and his daughters struggle to understand and finally to forgive him.

I have been slowly reading my way through the oeuvre of Philip Roth and American Pastoral is perhaps my favorite of his books so far. It's the story of a Jew from Weequahic area of Newark, New Jersey, which is where Roth himself grew up. "Swede" Levov struggles to live the American pastoral life and to do what the world expects of him. The effect on his daughter is traumatic.

The Bee Season refers to the annual run up to the national spelling bee. Eliza Naumann is an underachiever in a family of talented people until she wins her school spelling bee. As she goes on to win other preliminary bees her father loses interest in her brother, Aaron, and focuses entirely on Eliza, throwing the dysfunctional family out of whack. Aaron joins the Hare Krishna and her mother becomes a kleptomaniac. This is a profoundly sad book.

The series beginning this fall is about graphic novels. I'm going to force myself to sign up. Graphic novels were never my thing, even when they were called comic books (though Classic Comics did attract my attention for a time.)

Alice of Old Vincennes

Alice of Old Vincennes by Maurice Thompson, published in 1900, was in its time a hit nearly as popular as Ben Hur, written by Thompson's friend, Lew Wallace. An historical novel, it takes place in 1779 at Fort Sackville in what is now Vincennes, Indiana. The novel is based on the history of the takeover of the fort by the British and its retaking by George Rogers Clark.

I was delighted with the feisty heroine of this adventure story, a woman who quickly sews a flag to fly over the fort when news reaches Vincennes of the rebellion of the colonies, who despite her fear of him nurses an American Indian back to health after he has been attacked, and who can fence as well as some men and with much more skill than many.

And this was written in 1900! I wonder if Alice Roosevelt read the book when she was living in the White House. She would have appreciated the spunky Alice Roussillon.

Alice is an orphan who was originally named Alice Tarleton. She was kidnapped by the Indians as a small child and rescued by Gaspard Roussillon, the unofficial mayor of Vincennes, who with his wife has brought her up to be independent, intellectually curious, and eager to live life fully. In 1779 the "northwest" as it was then called, was a Francophone, Roman Catholic world peopled mostly by hunters and fur traders. Vincennes was fortunate to be a settled village with a church and old Father Beret, a Roman Catholic priest from France with a mysterious past.

Alice is good friends with Father Beret, who has taught her how to fence and who tries to guide her reading toward Montaigne and other great French writers. Alice prefers Scarron, Scudery, and Prevost, whose romances she reads when Mme Roussillon is not watching. Although Father Beret does his best to make a Roman Catholic of her, Alice vaguely remembers her mother teaching her the Lord's Prayer and she holds firmly to her somewhat uninformed Protestantism. She still has a locket her mother gave her that is engraved with the Tarleton family crest.

When the Americans arrive to announce that the colonies are breaking away from the mother country and to strengthen Fort Sackville, Alice falls wildly in love with the young second-in-command, Lieutenant Fitzhugh Beverley, a Beverley of Beverley Hall, Virginia, obviously a FFV. The lieutenant is equally smitten with Alice.

The fort is taken by the British, Lt Beverley escapes and after a frighteningly near thing when captured by the Indians, joins up with George Rogers Clark and his men as they return to oust the British. Once again the colonial flag that Alice made is run up the flagpole. The lovers sail off down the Wabash River to live happily ever after in Virginia.

The thing is, it's a true story. Well, perhaps Alice didn't disarm a British officer with her epee. And there is some question whether the original Alice was in real life quite as daring as the fictional one. But the bones of the story are there and the flag that Alice made now resides in a house near Monticello.

This is one of the books mentioned in 100 American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read (2007) by a Vermont librarian, Karl Bridges. You can read this novel online at Project Gutenberg.

Trollope Fans Take Notice

Have you heard about this?

I just read about it over on Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover.

I'm in ecstasy.

Ukranian Easter Eggs

White Easter?