MarysLibrary

The Death of a President

The October issue of Vanity Fair magazine has an article by Sam Kashner about William Manchester and what he went through writing The Death of a President: November 20 - November 25 1963. Jacqueline Kennedy asked Manchester to write the definitive account of John F Kennedy's assassination and Manchester felt he could not say no. Mrs Kennedy encouraged everyone to speak frankly with him about the events of that weekend and everyone did, excepting Lee Harvey Oswald's wife, who apparently refused to talk to anyone unless she was paid. The Vanity Fair article sent me to the book, which I had failed to read when it was published. It was time to read it now.

Manchester spent two years researching and writing the book, with a much-reduced income during that time as he accepted only a small advance and expected to earn almost nothing for himself from the book. He designated that the profits should go to the Kennedy Library, and they have made Manchester one of the largest contributors to the institution as the book sold in the millions.

When the publisher arranged for an excerpt from the book to be serialized in Life Magazine with the money to go to Manchester, the Kennedys, who by now were having second thoughts about the book, threatened a lawsuit to prevent publication. Eventually Jacqueline Kennedy realized that suing Manchester would result in negative publicity worse than that which would result from the publishing of the private feelings and impressions that she had shared frankly with Manchester four years earlier.

The book is exceedingly detailed but never tedious. Those of us who remember that day in November remember it very well. I was living in Massachusetts at the time and teaching at New Bedford High School. I was in the teacher's room with two women who had been my teachers only a few years before when the principal, Mr Garcia, came on the PA system to tell us the president was dead. He dismissed the school early and my sister, who was a student at NBHS, showed up in my home room and we drove home together.

Our family like most Americans spent much of the weekend watching TV. It is enlightening now to read about what was going on behind the scenes and the scramble between Friday night when Kennedy's body was brought back to Washington, DC, and Monday when there was a full-scale, historically based, and perfectly produced funeral.

Thousands of decisions had to be made: whether to have an open casket in the Irish manner, which groups would sing or play during the ceremonies, where the funeral would be, what route the procession would take, who would walk behind the casket.

People walked the roads of Arlington Cemetery in the pouring rain  for hours to find the perfect site for the grave. Librarians dashed about in the darkened Library of Congress with flashlights to find reports and photographs of Lincoln's funeral and to research the history of "Hail to the Chief." Angier Biddle Duke, the chief of protocol for the White House nearly had a nervous breakdown dealing with the simultaneous arrival of 91 heads of state or their representatives, not least of whom was Charles De Gaulle.

One of the most interesting leitmotifs in the book is the ongoing and deepening feud between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy. Manchester is exceedingly careful to be as objective as possible but the extreme dislike between the two men is impossible to avoid entirely. And of course the book skims over without mention the sexual escapades, the serious health issues, the amphetamine abuse, and various other less than admirable aspects of the Kennedy administration about which most of us knew nothing at the time or for many years after.

An excellent book. It's the first place to go if you're interested in this historic event in American history.

I've moved on to Seymour M Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), which is pretty depressing with it's tales of buying the nomination in 1960 and stealing the election and the connections with the Mafia and the antics of Kennedy's father and grandfather.

The "Best" Books of 2009?

I'm continuing to be intrigued by the list of "best" books from Publisher's Weekly. My library does have some of the books, but they are a little strange to say the least. Here's the PW description of Don Chaon's Await Your Reply:

Three disparate characters and their oddly interlocking lives propel this intricate novel about lost souls and hidden identities from National Book Award--finalist Chaon (You Remind Me of Me). Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who's been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle. Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters' individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what's real and what's fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel's structure echoes that of his well-received debut--also a book of threes--even as it bests that book's elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence.

Got that?

And here's Victor LaValle's Big Machine:

LaValle has garnered critical acclaim for his previous works (a collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and novel, The Ecstatic), and his second novel is sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe. Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice takes a chance on an anonymous note delivered to him at the cruddy upstate New York bus depot where he works as a porter. Quickly, Ricky finds himself among the "Unlikely Scholars," a secret society of ex-addicts and petty criminals, all black like him, living in remote Vermont and sifting through stacks of articles in a library devoted to investigating the supernatural; the existence of a god; and the legacy of Judah Washburn, an escaped slave who claimed to have had contact with a higher being that the Unlikely Scholars now call "the Voice." Ricky's intoxicating voice-robust, organic, wily-is perfect for narrating LaValle's high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, as the fateful porter-something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of "spiritual X-men"-wanders through America's "messianic hoo-hah."

Stitches, by David Small, is a graphic autobiography.

PW's 10 Best Books of 2009

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

Big Machine by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

Cheever by Blake Bailey (Knopf)

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War by Neil Sheehan (Random)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Lost City of Z by David Grann (Doubleday)

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Stitches by David Small (Norton).

I'm unimpressed.

Anybody got a rake?

An Air That Kills

I just wrote a lengthy review of a 1994 Andrew Taylor mystery, An Air That Kills, much more lengthy than my typical post about the books I've been reading. Typepad promptly erased it.

So I'll ask you to imagine a charming post about an unusually good mystery taking place immediately after World War II in a town on the border of England and Wales where newly arrived and newly promoted Detective Inspector Thornhill is assigned the task of identifying some tiny bones found in an old box in the foundations of an old (very old) inn. With the bones are a Victorian silver pin and a bit of a newspaper clipping.

Now imagine a witty description of the characters in this somewhat insular town, Lydmouth, and the problems the new detective is having fitting in. Picture an irascible boss and an untried assistant, an annoyed wife and a town butinski and a series of burglaries with something in common that leads our hero to a local criminal. But this guy doesn't do burglaries. It must be someone else.

Add a newspaperwoman from London who has given up her successful career for no reason her friends can discover and picture the negative electricity between this arrogant Londoner and the arrogant detective. Then mix in a possible murder and off you go. Oh, and assume that I recognized the title as a quote from a famous poem cycle that they are reading over at Cornflower Books.

It was a great review. Too bad Typepad lost it on me.

Campion -- a guest post by Wilhelm

 My word, has it really been 20 years since the debut of the BBC's brilliant Campion series, based upon the Margery Allingham novels?  Mary has been after me to do a guest post and I have just finished reading The Margery Allingham Omnibus, which collects the first three Campion novels -- The Crime at Black Dudley, The Mystery Mile, and Look to the Lady.  I suppose that would be of rather more interest to the readers of MarysLibrary than would my other current reading -- Wills, Trusts, and Estates, by Dukeminier, et al, (8th ed. 2009). 

Mary got me hooked on the Campion videos years ago and I have been meaning to get around to reading the actual books.  Awhile back I did read the final Campion novel, The Tiger in the Smoke.  Starting with the last book turned out to be a bad idea.  Tiger is a good mystery, but is only just barely a Campion mystery.  While reading the book I was struck by how easily Albert Campion could have been written out of it with little damage to the plot.  But, I perservered and got started, finally, on the right foot with The Margery Allingham Omnibus.

The first Campion novel, The Crime at Black Dudley, was similar to the final novel in that dear Albert is a supporting character who plays a relatively minor part in the story.  And, alas, Lugg does not appear at all.  The next novel, The Mystery Mile, introduces Lugg and further develops the character of Albert Campion.  Now, we're getting somewhere.  The third novel, Look to the Lady, is by far the best of the three.  This story was adapted for the premiere episode of the BBC's Campion series starring Peter Davison.  It's a delight. 

As the cold weather approaches, one could do far worse for an evening's amusement than to pass the time with a Campion book, or DVD, and some good Scotch whisky.

Daphne du Maurier

Nina Auerbach's 2000 "biography," Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, is an unusual book. My library classes it as biography but it's really a book of the author's memories of reading du Maurier with a flashlight under the sheets at summer camp combined with literary criticism that laments the fame of those novels demonstrating less of du Maurier's talent and the obscurity of her best work.

Although Auerbach is a feminist critic, an approach that normally makes me sigh and hold my nose, she seems to have more of a grasp of the real du Maurier than many who talk about her "romance" novels. There is precious little romance in Rebecca (1938), or in Jamaica Inn (1936) or Frenchman's Creek (1942) either for that matter.

I picked up this book because my book club is reading Rebecca for our November meeting and I have been reading around before I finally re-read the novel. I started with Jane Eyre because so many critics say that du Maurier was deeply influenced by Charlotte Bronte. Auerbach says no. Just because both books have a wimpy first-person narrator, a large house that burns down, and a love interest with a demonic first wife doesn't mean the novels have anything fundamental in common. I would agree.

Jane starts out in early youth with a backbone of steel and by the time Mr Rochester is through with her and she hits the road she has developed a fully-formed character and is able to resist him with all her being. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins and ends the novel subjugating herself to Maxim de Winter. She is a sadder but wiser and better dressed girl when she dreams she goes to Manderly again, but she doesn't fundamentally change. She remains at the mercy of a man, as do most of du Maurier's female protagonists. By the end of Bronte's novel, Jane is Mr Rochester's equal.

Auerbach would have us read other du Maurier novels instead of the three  most famous. She recommends Julius (1933), My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Scapegoat (1957), and The Glass-Blowers(1963.) Having read My Cousin Rachel, I can recommend that powerful book without reservation but like most people I have read no other du Maurier except Jamaica Inn, which believe it or not, I read under the covers with a flashlight. No 12-year-old dared read so daring a book in daylight in those more innocent days.

It's Like This, Cat

Today I read Emily Neville's children's book, It's Like This Cat, which won the Newbery in 1964. It's about a 14-year-old boy living in Gramercy Park in New York City who acquires a stray tomcat as a pet from a neighborhood cat lady. (How many cat ladies do you suppose live in upscale Gramercy Park?)

This is a gentle book with only two scenes that are scary or distasteful, but children's books were gentler 45 years ago. The most wrenching scene in the book is when the lad has to decide whether to have his tomcat altered or not.

The thing that startled me about this book is how difficult it must be for the 12-year-olds who are its target audience to understand some of the now-obsolete language. The narrator, Dave, refuses to lend his records to a friend because the guy never changes his needle. Dave sits on the front steps and listens to his transistor. He has his hair cut in the ivy-league style which upsets him because it took him three months to grow it into a DA.

The book is as historical for today's pre-teen as something written in 1910 would have been to me when I was 12. It needs notes in the back like those in the Penguin classics.

Dave his friends take the bus or subway to the Bronx Zoo, Coney Island, and the Fulton Fish Market. He has a date with a girl and they take the Staten Island Ferry and decide on the spur of the moment to see West Side Story on Broadway. (It costs them $2.90 each for tickets to the matinee.) Can anybody imagine anyone today letting their 14-year-olds wander the city alone without telling their parents where they're going?