Shakespeare and Company - Sylvia Beach

 

I know of  know institution in Paris that captures the Lost Generation - Hemingway, Joyce, Eliot, Stein, MacLeish, and Fitzgerald - than this small bookstore and the memoir of the bookstore by Sylvia Beach who owned and operated it is a classic peak into that era and literature.

Monnier in front of Shakespeare and Company

Sylvia Beach inside Shakespeare and CO. 

Across the street from Monnier's French bookshop Sylvia had a friend and partner in the book trade.  They collaborated and brought together the artistic stars of their era. Shakespeare and Company sold books, but it seems that the primary importance was serving as a subscription lending library.   For a fee customers could take home and read and enjoy the books without buying them.

Writers, like Hemingway, used this library service to hone their skills, study style and words, and educate themselves.  Each of those "Customer - client - friends" is featured in this book and their portrait  provides and excellent insight.

But the most engaging effort was the publication of James Joyce book - Ulysses.  Beach published no other book, but this was an effort that for love, not for money - Joyce burnt through all the money that came in for the book.  James Joyce has a special place throughout the book and this complex Irish Writer comes through the simple, but insightful short essays that serve as chapters.

James Joyce

Rawhide Justice - Max Brand

I have to read 2 -3 westerns a year for relaxation and nostalgia. Most Westerns follow a formula that is predictable, but still fun. In Rawhide Justice Brand created an unusual set of characters and tweaks the formula to make a very enjoyable storyline. A hero who is slim and wiry instead of muscular, who carries a rope instead of a gun, and a number of amoral characters who spice the book up. There are gypsies, a jailbreak,horses, and a set of three challenges that the hero - Reata must face. Like Hercules he must take a different tact to solve and survive each.

It is a clever story and despite the fact that it could never be considered great literature, it was still engaging.  Max Brand's most famous book and one I really enjoyed too was Destry Rides Again which was made into a movie.  Frederick Faust was a prolific writer who published over 500 books and 300 hundred of them were under the Pen Name - Max Brand. 

Born in Seattle (1892), Faust moved to the San Joaquin Valley California at a young age where he became orphaned and raised by High School Principal Thomas Downey.  Downey introduced him to classical literature which added to the romantic adventure books he had been devouring and influenced how he would eventually write. 

In 1921 he developed a heart condition that threatened his life.  A contemporary and competitor with Zane Grey, he was able to be independent in style - the Grey formula was not yet set for the genre - and yet, in pursuit of lifestyle he also followed Grey - lavish spending, acquiring lots of showy items and finding both a wife and a set of lovers. 

His Westerns were turned in to Tom Mix movies and his doctor series under another pseudonym was the source of a series of Dr Kildare movies.  He died as a War Correspondent in Italy in 1944.  

Ty Cobb - A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen

I read this to learn more about the first of the modern era superstars (Cap Anson had been the deadball era superstar). In my brain Cobb would be followed by Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Mays, Aaron, McGwire, and Bonds as the icons of their age.

But I soon found that there was a second story that was just as fascinating.  If Cobb was not quite the monster that was in the movie and if he was not the man who was featured in the previous biography, how did we swallow this myth?  Why did we believe it?

The book does tell about Cobb's life, especially his baseball career, but it also lets us in on a secret that has been kept for decades - Al Stump, the previous biographer was a liar.

He lied in many ways throughout his life and as Leershsen tries to fact check the Stump story he finds that one lie leads to another and then another.  Stump saw gold in the lies he told and he also got fame.  His follow up article in True Magazine got him his biggest pay day and added layers of lies to what he had already written.

The difficult and well handled truth of this biography is that Ty Cobb was not particularly lovable.  He was complex and he did have a hair trigger temper, but he was not the racist, killer, spike sharpening ghoul that many of us had been taught.

His popularity was up and down with the fans and the other players like Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, but his play on the field was always intense and it was a style that no one else has had, except maybe Rickey Henderson.  It was a psychological style of intimidation on the bases.  Henderson had this too and unnerved many pitcher and player, but he could not get on base like Cobb, a .366 lifetime average.

Cobb played against Ruth and lived to see the long ball take over.  It was hard for him to accept the change, but that is true of many of us "old-timers".

Through the biography you will meet many of the stars and characters of the early stage of modern baseball and it is a fascinating and well written journey.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

David McCullough just demonstrated how little I knew about these two important brothers and their unknown sister.  Almost everyone remembers that they made bikes and flew the first flight at a place called Kittyhawk.  And that is all most of us know.

But there was much more to their story than waking up and telling each other, lets build a flying machine.   They did research, they connected with the leading men in the small aviation world, and they did prototypes and gliders.

They not only built a plane, they also learned how to fly.  They used gliders to hone their skill and they build small scale wind tunnels to test ideas.  These men were engineers and scientists as well as the first pilots.

Then the big moment happens and the first reaction in the US was a yawn, but this did not discourage them.  They believed in what they were doing and even though they had to travel to France to get the encouragement they needed and some financial reward, they knew that eventually the US would discover and act on their work.

Their persistence with their own time and their own money to build this plane was amazing and well documented in a McCullough classic.  No write today does research better than this author and the writing is so clear and factual that you finish the book feeling like you know the subject.

Well organized and thorough, flight is the fourth character in this book, its early history and people like Langely who headed the Smithsonian and had lots of money and resources, but was secretive and did not share with the brothers and Octave Chanute, born in Paris, an American Civil Engineer, who did encourage and share his knowledge are part of the flight story.

Wilbur and Orville Wright almost come out as one character.  They were so close and stayed that way, unmarried except to their project, we start to see the subtle differences in the two dedicated men.

And ultimately the cast of characters will have the man they hired to run the shop and do their mechanical engineering as well as the sister who takes a prominent role after the flight.

The final important character is their father, the bishop, who is in the background of the story, yet is the key to the inspiration through a toy he gave the boys when they were young.

Great read and

A Nice Little Place on the North Side by George Will

I was disappointed.  George Will is a strong baseball fan and some of his writing is excellent, but this is low on the list.  As he says at the end he is gushing, but more than anything this story of Wrigley Field went in so many directions that it lost the most important direction - a narrative from beginning to end.

We learn about psychological and sociological studies, the text includes Shakespeare, Goethe, and quotes from Great Expectations and William Butler Yeats.

There are baseball references - a trivia distributed throughout text - which is fun, but too short to satisfy the baseball fan who wants to wallow in the suffering of cubs fans.

It is short and part of it are really enjoyable, but overall it is for those in love with the stadium.

River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon.

Because I have walked around Lake Superior and taken the entire Mississippi River I really looked forward to this book. I did enjoy it, but I wanted more of the places, the scenery, the rivers and the lakes. 

It was a personal adventure and perhaps a quest so it focused on the passengers and the problems. It was fun and there were some real challenges that they surmounted.

All adventurers can relate to a crazy dream like this and the effort it took to boat from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Imagine - he went up the Erie Canal, he boated the length of the Ohio and the Missouri rivers and came out where Lewis and Clark met the Pacific Ocean.  It is quite a feat. 

For light enjoyable reading I recommend it.

The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle by Russell Miller

I have always been a fan of Sherlock and I knew of the antipathy of the author towards his star creation, so, of course, I have been curious about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and this book answered all the questions.

Unfortunately, it answered much more than I really wanted to know. It is exhaustive and exhausting.  Still it is a biography I am glad I read.  Doyle is a fascinating tragic figure.

He tries to live the adventurous life and has grandiose dreams.  Here is a man who creates Challenger in the Lost World, Sherlock in a grand series of mystery stories and yet he loves his creation Sir Nigel and assesses almost forgotten novels as his prize creation.

He travels to South Africa where he is Watson in the Boer War and throughout his life he travels the world.

In the end, this man who can create the intellectual detective - Holmes - who possesses no patience with the frills of mysticism, finds himself the world's foremost advocate of spiritualism.

He is deceived in a way that will mark the final decades of his life, ruin friendship, and lose him both money and respect.  He dies happy and rich so it does not destroy him, but he cannot see through the trickery.  This pits him against Houdini, the great magician, who wants to expose the fraud and from friendship they grow to competitive opposites like Holmes and Moriarity.

Animal Wise by Virginia Morell

For too long humans have sought to reinforce our egotistical place as elite among life. We have insisted only we can make and use tools, but now we find many species, genera, and families of life can use tools.

We thought only we had feelings, thoughts, language, but as the scientists in this book discover, all animals have thought and many have abilities that actually exceed ours.

To those who like the old ladder of life with us on the top rung it is time to change. It is time to acknowledge that life of all forms and shapes has the values and abilities that make them special.

True, we have a language that allows writing and preservation of facts and knowledge, but that is where our genetic development has accomplished the most.

The issue is that when we respect the fact that animals can speak, learn, communicate, feel emotions, feel pain we develop an empathy for them. Most important we develop a respect. And then we know that their loss is a loss for the planet and for us. 

Human treatment, like cleaning the air and the water is not a burden, it is what we should expect if we as a species have the highest order of thought - ethics. 

Each chapter is a different thread, each story from ants to fish to birds to apes to dogs is insightful, entertaining and educational.

Profiles in Folly by Alan Axelrod

What a history book!  Lets just get to it - what is the worst and dumbest decisions ever made, US, World,not the universe - yet.  Axelrod not only writes a book that is easy to read, it is a book that is hard to put down.  My God, what other dumb decision is there?  From Custer to Katrina, from Rasputin to George W Bush we are treated to thoughtful essays that provide us with a great opportunity to see when leadership failed us.

Enron to Edsel the book jumps from politics to economy.  The book looks at some of the worst presidents to some of the best, but it spares no rod when it sees the Gulf of Tonkin and the Dred Scott decisions.

This book is real and thought provoking history.  From "I am not a crook" to the racist refusal to use the African American Troops at Petersburg we are reminded that we do not live with the best decisions, we survive the worst.

The Old Ways

As a walking person I was drawn to Macfarlane's book, but I did not really understand that it was a walking tribute to Edward Thomas who was the writer that influenced Robert Frost and was the basis for the Two Paths Diverge verses.  

It is a book that is rich in references to paths, writing, walking, philosophy.  

These are the folk paths, the journeys by foot that have marked the earth for centuries and the landscape that is encountered when they are walked now.  

Some parts of the book drag and others are too short.  Depending upon your reference, each chapter has a different perspective and collectively they honor the basic experience of walking.. 

 It started out slowly and suddenly it was over.  How did that happen.  Maybe, like a walk, it takes time to get your stride, to feel the landscape and find the stories that are all around. 

A Spy Among Friends

I grew up on I Led Three Lives - a television series based on Herbert Philbrick. It was a series that my vague memory puts as a classic. In Wikipedia it describes the series: "It was loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s." In this book we go back to that era and find the most notorious of all spies - Kim Philby double agent who single-handedly turned the western spy agents into a joke. A Russian agent, Philby almost became the head of British spies. 

Here is the ultimate of spying, almost a parody of the parody I SPY in Mad magazine. So sophisticated were our spies that we could not figure out when someone in our own agency was causing the people we supported to be caught, captured, and killed by the Soviets.

It has to be an embarrassment to the families of the leading spies in the US and Britain and it is a good lesson for everyone in this clandestine game.

It is a fascinating story and well written.

The Caning by Stephen Puleo

Drama is difficult when the results are known, but in this historic recounting of the famous caning by southern Brooks to northern Senator Sumner there is a tension that you look for in good novels.

Bloody Kansas, a country tired of the horrible institution called slavery and a south comfortable in the inconsistent application of whip, chain, and inhumanity of the institution meant that conflict was inevitable. 

Even religion could not expel or justify this blight on national history, but the results of one man - Representative Brooks - taking a cane to beat another man - Charles Sumner in the halls of congress seemed to be the keystone to the shift in the debate.

No longer was it the dance that Madison had caused around this albatross, but rather it was an open and flagrant conflict that could be embodied in the bloody and invalid Sumner. 

The time for genteel discussion and compromise was past. The caning represented so much more and the bloodshed in Kansas was beyond comprehension as the bullies of Missouri poored across the border.

Ruffians they were but much more, this was a flagrant violation of the right of a state to choose for itself and the emotions brought John Brown and his boys to righteous indignation and eye for an eye retribution.

All in all the act of caning made Lincoln possible and war inevitable. Following the tableau is fascinating and absorbing.

Shantyboat on the Bayous by Harlan Hubbard

 This is the second book in the trilogy about Harlan and Anna HubbardIn this book we find the conclusion of their 7 years living on a Shanty boat.  After reaching New Orleans they and their two dogs went through the Harvey Canal and began an odyssey of life in the bayous and coastal wetlands that make the southern shore of Louisiana so unique and intriguing.

They are floating pioneers, living off the land and waters, they lead a sustainable life and work as a couple in this partnership.  Set in 1950 this is long before we began to see the need for small houses, sustainable living, low impact choices.  This is a voyage that is not based on money, but rather fortitude.

They are not trapped by schedules, but, rather, stop and go as they desire.  Sometimes it is overnight, sometimes a month.  It is leisurely and yet it has the demands of finding food, repairing the boat and keeping themselves stocked with necessities.  

They fish, gather wild pokeweed, and find a way to observe the Cajun People, places, and lifestyles.  The two artists have an eye for life around them and share their keen observations with the reader.  

It is also a historic photo of the land that has now succumbed to the ravages of land loss, oil exploitation and intrusions of our corporate greed into these isolated regions.  Today many islands and lands they saw are no longer there.

But the hint of what will happen in the 65 years since they lived here are in the book.  The flames and sounds of oil rigs, the new road...

Death on the Greasy Grass by C M Wendeloe

This is a really fun series that deserves its own television production, like Longmire.  I enjoy the characters, the sprinkling of Crow and Lakota history and beliefs and the landscape of the Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn).

This is an iconic location and as such it has had lots of history and fiction (sometimes the history is fiction) written about it so it is fitting that the mystery would engage with the Custer legend and impose on current day Crow and Lakota relationships a mysterious diary that appears to be as responsible for current murders as it is a record of historic events.

This is not a big city procedural and it will not be confused with CSI, but it is fitting to this wide open space where the rules of life and engagement seem somehow more tied to historic old-west actions than to the rules of modern law enforcement.

Manny Tanno is FBI from Pine Ridge, imagine that! And he has a case on the Crow Reservation (a Lakota working on the land of the traditional Lakota enemies).  This is a case that crosses lots of lines and the dialogue and the personal issues seem to fit with the storyline and the land.

Empire of Sin by Gary Krist

This was an excellent history of New Orleans centering around Storyville and the Italian and African American prejudices of the time.  Spiced with the story of jazz and the bad reputation that was assigned to this truly American music this book is a page turner.

Written more like a novel than a history; the book describes a variety of crimes and leads us through the events and people associated with these event and allows the reader to make discoveries within the text, but never before it is appropriate.

Madams, musicians, and politicians all have their roles here.  The Black Hand of the Italians, Jim Crow leveraged against the blacks, and, always, the moralizing groups who want to impose their gods and their false set of standards on others appear throughout the book.

There is the tension between those who seek pleasure and those who would deny it.  Between those who are coerced and those who make choices.  It is a morality play with lots of stories to test our sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Larger than life characters emerge and carry us through the various threads and lead us to ask what if?    

Shantyboat - Harlan Hubbard

This classic book is one every river person should read. Harlan and his wife Anna take seven years aboard a shantyboat that they built themselves to go off the grid and explore the land and the waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi River. They are not in a hurry - every spring they pull in, plant a garden, settle into a new community of people, fish, pick berries and show us a wonderful life that is beautiful in both the scenery and the way of living.

He is an artist and both are musicians. They find pleasure in meeting people discovering new locations, gathering wild vegetables, eating from the land and the river they interact with drifters and fishermen as they go.

Moving with the current and no motor they are truly adrift and vulnerable to the whims of the great rivers.   This is after both the 1937 and 1927 floods and before the big box store invasion so the picture of the places is really valuable to our collective consciousness and image of the rivers. 

I just wish I could have met them and gone on board!

The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story and writing.  McKinely is mostly known for being the man who died so that Theodore Roosevelt could become president, but as this political biography of the man, his assassin and the times proves, he is worth studying too.

It was a turbulent time when we had oversized power in the hands of corporations and the uber rich - a time so similar in some ways to what is happening now that we really have an obligation to look in the mirror of history.

It is a time of anarchists - people who will and did you violence - in response to repression and strike breaking violence.  People like Emma Goldman put to voice important issues and frustrations and an obscure immigrant Czolgosz reacted to both his personal frustration and the anger in Goldman's speeches and kills the president, as a result.

McKinely is portrayed as a very charismatic man, but one thrust into wars in Cuba and the Philippines and struggles in China.  While not a man hungering for war like so many of his colleagues, he is driven by Capitalism to find a way to keep the factories humming and production up which means taking an imperialistic stance to accumulating lands offshore and across the globe.

Hawaii, China, Guam and many other locations appear in this story alongside the Haymarket violence and other domestic stories.  I am delighted that I came on to this book and discovered the depth I did not anticipate.

Natchez Burning by Greg Iles

This was almost a perfect five star book. The pace was terrific, the dialogue was compelling, the combination of characters worked well together and were interesting people to read about and interact with. 

Set in Natchez where I travel regularly in my work on the Cruise boat I felt the community - actually both communities - Natchez and across the river Vidalia. The author gave us his familiarity with the place and people. This was outstanding.

The tension was charged with the racial context of KKK and a past of killings and burnings that were part of the sixties, but that continue today barely beneath the surface. The title suggests the legendary movie Mississippi Burning with good cause. Hatred is a vile element of the human story and racial hatred is especially vile since it does not respond to a person, but to a bland and stupid sense of superiority based on nothing but color.

This kind of hatred leads to violence, but it does not lead to dialogue and peaceful resolution. It is a blind rage and when the KKK and putrid offshoots begin to lash out it escalates to even more violence. 

So we have a mayor who has feels the compulsion to protect his father, a doctor, who would seem to have been the Mother Teresa of the region, but is now confronted with a racial murder charge, a potential half brother who wants the doctor prosecuted despite age and infirmities.

The Doctor has a close friend in an ex-Texas Ranger and the Mayor has a finance who is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist. Outside the family bonds is a crusading investigator who wants to nail the KKK for killing his friend and mentor and a DA who has a vendetta against the mayor.

Then there are the evil men insinuated into community wealth, the Louisiana Police force and a pack between murderers and torturers forming a formidable group of adversaries.

Normally I hate books that exceed the good taste of a 400 page novel and this almost doubles that, but it is written so well that it flies by and pages are gone in a breathless desire to get to the end. And luckily, the pages are so well written that you do not want to skim, you want to read and be involved.

So why only four stars? Well it is the ending. Only a part of the loose ends are tied up. There is not even an attempt to put some of the story lines to rest when it comes to a halt. For me, it is not even the most compelling storyline that ends. So what comes next - another book, I assume and if that is the case I would have liked to see PART One somewhere at the beginning.

Nebraska - the movie

Every once in a while you find a movie that just stays with you, you replay lines and scenes in your mind, and find that the movie just reached in and connected with you. Not guns and wild chases, not wild women and breathtaking scenery, but a part of life comes across in subtlety and charm. The humor not slapstick nor coarse, but straight from the homeland. Such a discovery was Nebraska - Bruce Dern - a black and white movie which was perfect in its lack of color. Color would embarrass these people of the plains. The scenery was flat as possible, the images of the town were of a dying community, still hanging on with a cast of characters that are almost interchangeable with any other small town on the great plains.

The images of the old guys sitting on the couch, all asleep, all with their mouths agape, the jealousy when it looks like one of their own might rise above the crowd...all painted an amazing set of pictures.

This movie is certainly not for everyone. Some will read my first paragraph and say no sex, no violence, no phony patriotism, why bother, but for those of us with Midwest backgrounds from Ohio to the Rockies it is a set of scenes from our childhood, our neighbors, our life's.

An old man thinks he won a million dollars not understanding that this is another of the millions of scams that come in the mail (and now on the internet) and a son so hungry for his father's love that he will sacrifice his own comfort to help in a Quixotic journey.

These are people who have their life, their passion, their emotions bottled up within themselves. Unable to express things directly there is an internal conflict with bigger ideas and bigger emotions. I loved it and still smile at the mental images it gave me.

Books of 2014

Already having 7 great books for 2015, it is time to set aside Burning Natchez by Greg Iles and Moving Day by Jonathan Stone and reflect on 2014:

From the 113 books I read in this great year which did I give five stars in my rambling style of grabbing books wherever I am, inspired by what I am seeing, what I am teaching, and what stands out in the independent book stores I visit.  Lots of really good books, but only a few do I give my five star rating and that rating has no rationale other than how I felt when I finished the book:

***** listed in sequence from the last read to the first.  Not in rank order.

• You Are My Sunshine - Stanley Gordon West - a multi-generational ranch family and their complexity as they grow move out, move back. West is good to his name capturing the largest of the land.
• America's Other Audubon Joy Kiser.  A good story about a work hidden in the archives.  A young genius is inspired by Audubon and involves her family in the collection of nests and eggs that fill her magnificent paintings.
• Paw and Order - Spencer Quinn.  The lovable dog and his barely efficient detective partner are in D. C. where they manage to cross over to a level of spy story intrigue, but don't worry Chet the Jet - the best dog detective in the world is still hilarious and intelligent.
• Scoop - Jeff Miller.  Who knew that buying and continuing an ice cream business in Hayward, WI could be so funny and informative.  As you would assume from this rating it is about a small town adjusting to a gay couple, a new voice, and in turn, their adjust to the town.
• The Book Thief - Makus Zusak.  This excellent story is set in a small German town during the war and is a good look at the importance of books as a repository for truth.
• Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow.  This is a book of invention, communal unrest and racism.  It is 1906, but it is also today.
• Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krugar.  An outstanding and strong story of death in a small town where the conflicting emotion of a death is both a reflection on the person and the people who were connected to that person.
• Genius of Place, Justin Martin.  A biography of Frederick Law Olmstead and his work to create parks and preserve a sense of Place.
• Home Sweet Anywhere, Lynne Martin.  About a couple that sells their home and freely lives wherever they want around the world.
• The Stages, Thom Satterlee.  A Danish mystery set in Copenhagen.  With the narrator suffering from Asper and accused of murder this is an insightful story and mystery.
• The Homesman, Glenden Swarthout.  Set in Nebraska, a covered wagon full of women who are bound for a mental institute provides for many personality dynamics with a less than forthright guide and a determination to get things done right.
• The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert.  Excellent look at our planet and our dying species.  Kolbert has examined global climate change and other issues which all come together in this book.

****Listed from first read to last, no order of rank intended and titles without notes.

• Old Man River, Paul Scheider
• Madam, Cri Lynn and Kelly Martin (early New Orleans prostitution)
• The Trail to Seven Pines, A Hopalong Cassidy story by Louis L'Amour
• Unfathomable City, Snedeker and Solnit - Examining New Orleans by maps
• The Dark Horse, Craig Johnson.  Longmire store.
• The Story of Earth, Robert Hazon.
• The Red Mans Bones, Benita Eister.  Life of George Catlin.
• The Hammer.  Sports Illustration collection of stories about Hank Aaron
• Badluck Way, Bruce Andrew.  Ranch in SW Montana
• The English Major. Jim Harrison. Sex, Drugs, and life's journey
• Lincoln Letter, William Martin
•  Born to Run, Christopher McDougall
• American Naitons, Colin Woodard. Differences that prevent the United States from uniting.
• The Whiskey Rebels, David Liss.  Hamilton's bank and the country distillers.
• Deadball, David Stinson.  Baseball in the ghostly parks that of historic America
• Going Somewhere, Brian Benson.  Bike ride from WI to OR
• West of the Revolution, Claudio Saunt.  Events in North America while the revolution took place in the East.
• The Good Thiefs Guide to Amsterdam, Chris Ewan.
• Let them Eat Shrimp, Kennedy Warne.  The loss of mangroves and the impact on sea food.
• Cinnamon Kiss, Walter Moseley
• Hydro Carbon Hucksters, Zubrowski
• War Dogs, Rebecca Frankel
• Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain (read again for ???time)
• River of Conflicts: River of Dreams, bilone Whiting Young.
• Toys of the 50's. 60's 70's, Roberts and Sher
• In the Kingdom of Ice, Hampston Sides.  Tragedy of ship Jennette and her explorers.
• Spirit of the Ojibwe, Balbin Baille.  Story of Lacourt O'reilles reservation and people

Sorry, but no space for 3,2,1 stars.

The Bohemians by Ben Tarnoff

This book was one I looked forward to reading for the insight I would get into writing as it developed in the west, but it soon became much more - in fact it set a high standard for the new year and allowed me new insights in to the complex life and personality of Mark Twain as his career makes the critical turn in the Gold Camps. 

The circumstances of this time period have never been laid out so thoroughly and Twain's very complex personality really plays out in this book, but even more so because of the contrast with his contemporaries who form the Bohemians. Ina Coolith, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Bret Harte complete the foursome that flips literature from East to West and back again. Each of these made a major contribution during their lifetimes, but only Twain ascended to the Master's level. 

We see this group like so many writers groups - I just finished watching the hilarious movie Authors Anonymous and in this small group of four we find the basis for many stereotypes. Ina Coolbrith is, perhaps, the saddest. She obtains the status of state poet laureate in old age, but it is the life she lives, tied to the bonds of her family. She cares for the old, raises children that are not hers, watches Stoddard sail to the islands and Twain and Harte move east, but she is bound to the place and is sad because of it.

Stoddard is another who becomes a role player in the group. He is a man lost in his own world and unable to identify with the world around him. His sexuality finally finds expression in the warm and idyllic islands of the Pacific and he is able to create one great work of literature, but his spiral cannot continue upward and he loses his position in literature as he struggles to be a secretary for Twain and other roles he is not suited for.

Harte is the man of immense talent and an even larger ego. "A DANDY" in his fancy clothes, a skeptic, a critic, and bitter in his philosophy and writing. Luck of Roaring Camp is his classic. It pulls him from the West to the East and by leaving California which had provided his muse he has only his inflated sense of self left. He will insult and injure all who reach out to him and his ego will not allow himself to be rescued.  This will include his most popular work the Heathen Chinee that originally was a plea to understand the racism that impacted the Chinese and ultimately became an instrument to increase the racism.  He sees himself as a martyr, but in fact he is a self destructing narcissist and his tragedy lacks sympathy because he has cut off all who would mourn.

But the group is driven by Twain, who, like Harte, begins by allowing cruelty and self righteousness to affect his early writing. The result is a need to periodically run from the storms he creates. The Bohemians help to ground him and they would all have remained friends if Harte had not developed such a toxic and acerbic presence that will finally flip friendship for enmity. In the end, it is Harte's criticism of Twain's home (he lived there free) and then of Livy (Twain's wife) that makes the separation complete.

We can follow Twain who is driven by jealousy of Harte's success and then see him rise to the ultimate level of literary reputation. The entwined lives are fascinating