A Winter Update

Bless me, bloggers, for I have sinned.  It has been six weeks since my last posting.

I should know by now that my writing output is one of the most obvious things to suffer during my self-imposed hibernation.  But just because I haven’t been reporting on my goings-on doesn’t mean that they haven’t been happening.  Let me fill you in…

I’ve stayed active.  Knowing that my metabolism slows as the temperature lowers, and that there are plenty of treats to be had this time of year, I’ve added in extra work-outs with my buddy, Alex.  He finally wore me down and got me to agree to try the Insanity Workout program.  So here’s a taste of what he and I get up to three times a week.

Insanity Workout

A more leisurely athletic accomplishment came just before Thanksgiving, when my fellow agents and I finally defeated the casting directors at show biz softball!  I went 4 for 4 at the plate during our 17-7 drubbing of our dreaded opponents.  There was the typical trash-talking and dirt-kicking, but when all was said and done, we still got together at a dive bar on Avenue A to enjoy pitchers and wings.

Yeah, I look like I need that pitcher, don't I?

But outdoing me on all fronts was kickball legend Stacy, running her second (or was it third?) New York City marathon!  She’s gone from Ol’ Whiskey Lips to Ol’ Whiskey Hips!  Way to go, Stacy!

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I made my first trip to the movies in ages to see The Muppets, which I thought was absolutely delightful.  Writer and star Jason Segel imbued the film with the love and reverence of a true fan.  It keeps the spirit of the old Muppet films and TV shows but gives it enough modern sourness and self-awareness to mesh with today’s comic tastes, so as to not feel like a stale reboot.  And the songs by Bret McKenzie were a wonderful surprise.

I also did some reading these past weeks.  A duo of works by Hollywood’s hardest-working funny ladies, Ellen DeGeneres and Tina Fey, were enjoyable as expected, but surprisingly opposing in style.  Ellen’s Seriously…I’m Kidding is half comic essays on her life of late as an established celebrity, and half left-over material from her talk show monologues (I say “left-over” because they honestly weren’t that funny).  But Tina Fey’s Bossypants is a full-blown memoir in which the good-natured author reveals that, after spending half her life climbing the show biz ladder, she still holds a handful of axes to grind.  And like any good writer, she doesn’t mince words (“The definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore”).

I also reached a benchmark in my American history reading, having now cleared the Civil War era.  My latest selection was Eli N. Evans’s Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate.  Evans’s biography of the most powerful pre-twentieth century Jew in American politics is deeply interesting.  Benjamin, born to modest means in the British Caribbean, wound up becoming a United States senator and one of the architects of the Confederacy.  As Jefferson Davis’s most trusted professional ally, Benjamin was right at the heart of the Confederate machine.  But for all his skill as a politician, it was his legal talents that he was most remembered for.  It was how he made his fortune as a young man in New Orleans, and how he later supported himself–quite comfortably–in England, following his escape from the South.  Since Benjamin destroyed most of his papers during and after his flight from America, Evans is forced to explain Benjamin’s life from some interesting perspectives: as a friend of Jefferson and Varina Davis, and as a prominent Jew living in a place and time in which anti-Semitism soared among the populace.  Benjamin proves to have had a powerfully analytic mind, and seems to have had a disturbing ability to apply it to his personal life.  His marriage to the notoriously unfaithful Natalie St. Martin was worth increasing his social standing; his adherence to his faith waxed and waned as necessary given the personal or professional company he kept; his wholesale rejection of his time at the forefront of Union and Confederate politics was simply a bit of show to impress his British colleagues.  Everything was a means to an end; and as such, his loyalty to anyone but his beloved brother-in-law, Jules, and his daughter, Ninette, appears to have been completely flexible.  Given the incomplete source material, Evans has done a good job in painting a full portrait of a man who apparently was content to have been forgotten.

Finally, you’ll be happy to know that in a week or so, I’ll be posting some outrageous tales of adventure, as I am leaving soon to visit my best bud, Kevin, in tropical St. Maarten!  This is the biggest adventure of 2011.  I aim to close the year out with a bang.  Stay tuned, readers!

~ T

Book Review: “Michael Tolliver Lives” and “Mary Ann in Autumn” by Armistead Maupin

Hey, everyone!  Apologies for keeping things dormant lately.  Kickball’s over, the weather’s turning colder (well, with the notable exceptional of this beautiful weekend), and the Yankees…well, that’s better left undiscussed for the moment.  But I have been having some adventures lately, and I’ve also been tearing through some books.  Let’s cover the literary diversions first, shall we?

A few months ago I reviewed Sure of You, the melancholy conclusion to Armistead Maupin’s landmark Tales of the City series.  It was a bittersweet accomplishment.  On the one hand, I’d read through Maupin’s entire San Franciscan saga, which probably totaled over 1,200 pages.  On the other hand, it was over.  Thankfully, Maupin decided four years ago to explore where the remaining veterans of Barbary Lane might find themselves in the 21st century.  In Michael Tolliver Lives and Mary Ann in Autumn, Maupin catches us up on what we’ve missed in the intervening twenty-plus years, introduces us to the next generation of unique Bay Area personalities, and carries the story forward with all his standard hallmarks: coincidences, conspiracies, and comedy.

Michael Tolliver Lives is a departure from the previous Tales books, in that it is told in the first person.  Michael is the star of the show here, as he navigates a new relationship with a younger beau and manages the push-and-pull of caring for the ailing members of biological family in Florida and his “logical” family in San Francisco.  Michael Tolliver Lives is most important for introducing readers to a whole new crop of characters, including Michael’s lover, Ben; Michael’s professional apprentice, Jake Greenleaf; and Brian and Mary Ann’s grown daughter, Shawna, a local literary legend, thanks to her provocative slice-of-San-Franciscan-life blog.  Keeping the story narrowed to Michael’s POV was a swing-and-miss, if you ask me, only because it deprived us of the chance to get inside the minds of new characters and, more importantly, those of the old ones.

Mary Ann in Autumn, however, feels more like the original installment of Tales of the City than other.  After making only a cameo in Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann Singleton returns to San Francisco with little more than her baggage (physical and emotional), just as she did back in 1976.  Facing a double-whammy of life-altering changes, Mary Ann has come back west to fight her battles with friends like Michael and DeDe at her side.  She’s forced to confront the friends, neighbors, and the daughter she left behind.  There’s more to the book than just Mary Ann, though.  Michael worries about the stability of his marriage, Jake encounters a troubled Mormon missionary, and all the original Barbary Lane tenants–including the indefatigable Mrs. Madrigal–find themselves threatened when the last great unsolved mystery of the Tales of the City series comes back into focus.

These two books show that Maupin has a lot of mileage left with these characters, and his San Francisco is still a place with plenty of stories to tell.

~ T

Book Review: “Jefferson Davis, American” by William J. Cooper, Jr.

It took me just about the entire summer, but this past week I finally finished William J. Cooper, Jr’s extensive biography of former congressman, senator, cabinet secretary, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis.  Jefferson Davis, American did not take me twelve weeks to read simply because it was 700 pages, or because it wasn’t written well (though the chronology sometimes jumped forward and back, and as a result there were some repetitive passages that a more ruthless editor would have excised).  No, Cooper’s tome on this titan of the South took me an entire season to get through because it was incredibly difficult to read so much about a person who was so wrong about so many things.

Cooper makes no apologies for Mr. Davis’ perspective on things.  In fact, his introduction explicitly states that his book is meant neither to vilify nor qualify his beliefs.  They were simply the prevailing wisdom of the age.  Yet it’s one thing to say that the majority of white men believed in the superiority of their race; it’s quite another when you engage in a case study of a white man who shared that belief and who wielded enormous influence in the nation for nearly half a century.  The evidence Cooper assembles shows that, despite his editorial attempts at rehabilitation in closing passages, Jefferson Davis never changed his opinion that black people were inherently less than white people–even after the war he waged to ostensibly defend that view failed miserably.

Davis always contended that the Civil War was not about whether black people should be free or slave.  His view was that the growing northern sentiment towards emancipation was being forced upon the southern economy, of which slave labor was the bedrock.  He saw it as a power play to subjugate the south, politically and economically, and thus viewed secession as not only a constitutional right but as a necessity.  War, he contended, was never his design.  Cooper’s evidence supports this; but the storm that had been brewing since Davis’s days as a senator was too strong for him to stop by 1861.

Most Americans today know Davis as the president of the Confederacy (that is, if they know him at all), but I found those years of his life to actually be the least interesting.  Here is a collection of some amusing facts about Mr. Davis:

• He traveled in influential circles at a very young age.  His parents sent him from their home in Mississippi to receive an education at the famed Transylvania University in Kentucky, where Henry Clay was on the Board of Trustees.  On his journey north, he stopped at the home of former president Andrew Jackson, a personal hero of his.
• He attended West Point.  A number of contemporaries would later fight for and against him in the Civil War.  He was a bit of a rowdy cadet, but graduated and earned a good assignment at the edge of the American frontier, commanded by future president Zachary Taylor.
• Davis won the hand of Taylor’s daughter, Sarah, despite her parents’ initial objections.  They were married briefly before she died.
• Davis was on the front lines of the Mexican War, fighting to expand America’s borders deeper into the southwest.  Despite running the Civil War from Richmond many years later, he would never again be at the forefront of battle.
• He suffered numerous lifelong maladies, including bronchial diseases, eye infections that almost blinded him, and the recurrent effects of malaria.
• He was incredibly well-traveled, seeing most of America and Western Europe in his 81 years.

I think the most interesting thing about Jefferson Davis is simply the fact that he survived the Civil War.  I don’t recall ever learning what became of him.  As it turns out, Davis was held in a military prison for eighteen months while President Andrew Johnson, a bitter Congress, and a wary Supreme Court all argued over how to handle a case the likes of which the nation had never seen and its founders had never anticipated.  In the end, he was released with little fanfare and no official pardon.  For the rest of his days, he would struggle to make ends meet, as his Mississippi plantation was now in disrepair and he was not allowed to re-enter public life; but he had no shortage of encouragement from his many ardent supporters.

Joseph Davis

Central to the story of Jefferson Davis are two influential and conflicting presences in his life: his eldest brother, Joseph, and his second wife, Varina.  Joseph was more of a father figure to Jefferson than a big brother, and he took their relationship quite seriously on those terms.  He was generous and sincere; it was he who gave Jefferson the land to start his successful plantation, Brierfield.  But he could also be domineering and intrusive, something the independent and ambitious Varina did not appreciate.  Varina thrived in Washington, with its vibrant social scene at the center of such important work.  Conversely, when consigned to Brierfield, she was bored and lonesome, and chafed terribly under the presumptive chaperoning of the nearby Joseph.

Varina Howell Davis

The two were practically of different generations, and while Jefferson strived to please both simultaneously, he rarely succeeded.  It was only as the war approached and Jefferson’s responsibilities became so consuming away that he and Varina were finally out of Joseph’s shadow.  Even after the war, when their futures were all uncertain, Varina and Joseph never reconciled.  In an epic sign-off on the eve of secession, Varina told a deeply touched Joseph that it was solely her husband’s idea to name one of their sons after him.  ”I owe you nothing, and perfectly appreciate your hostility to me,” she declared.

Cooper’s book is an interesting portrait of a man who is, in his convictions and his actions, decidedly of a different time.  While it is almost completely objective, some apologia nevertheless presents itself in the uneventful final pages.  I understand that the Civil War is 150 years behind us, but I still see something inexcusable about that.  Cooper kneecaps himself just before the finish line of making a perfectly valid argument: Jefferson Davis was a capable, intelligent man who built his life on some really bad ideas.

~ T

Book Review: “Sure of You” by Armistead Maupin

Spoilers ahead! 

With a heavy heart, I finished the sixth and final volume of Armistead Maupin’s original Tales of the City series, Sure of You.  Maupin’s focus this time out is at its narrowest, as he carefully chronicles the dissolution of the outrageous family forged at 28 Barbary Lane.

When a face from Mary Ann’s past offers her an unparalleled opportunity to take her career to the next level, it stretches her already thinning connections to husband Brian and adopted daughter Shawna past the breaking point.  Caught in the middle of Mary Ann and Brian’s downward domestic spiral is Michael.  As Mary Ann’s best friend and Brian’s business partner, Michael hesitates to choose sides.  Given his own situation–living with HIV, watching a community die out, and facing the outrage of his activist lover–he contemplates severing ties with both of them.  Elsewhere, Mrs. Madrigal vacations with Mona and wonders if the next phase in her life is waiting beyond her beloved San Francisco.

So, yeah, compared to the naughty romps and silly mysteries of yore, Sure of You is the real downer of the series.  It still features Maupin’s wonderful wit, his precise dialogue, and his thorough characterization.  It’s just so sad to see these beloved characters torn apart like this.  The only one who I didn’t feel completely sorry for was Mary Ann.  Gracefully but frustratingly, Maupin turned her into the antithesis of the Barbary Lane crowd: a self-centered, social climber whose views only got narrower with time.  Tellingly, it winds up being Michael who has the stormiest of partings with her, and not Brian.  Yet it all still feels in character, even if it feels so wrong.

Maupin revisited the Tales characters in two later works, which I plan to read this year; but Sure of You marks the end of the original experiment, which has been one of the most worthwhile reads I’ve ever enjoyed.  If I haven’t already convinced you to pick up these books, I don’t know what else I can do.

~ T

Book Review: “Honeymoon with My Brother” by Franz Wisner

Since official baseball correspondent Tripp is coming to visit this week, I figured I’d pull myself out of my blogging slump and finally review the book he recommended to me, Honeymoon with My Brother by Franz Wisner.

In Wisner’s autobiographical travelogue, he recounts how being left at the altar spurred him to sever almost all connections to his pre-jilting life (job, home, and even some personality traits) and travel the world in the hope of finding his place in it.  Along for the ride was his younger brother Kurt, the typically laid-back younger sibling, a perfect foil to the Type-A Franz.  Together, they traverse five continents and build a brotherly bond that both admit had been missing.

If you knew Tripp as I do, you wouldn’t be the least bit surprised that this is the kind of book he’d recommend.  But even a cynic like me enjoyed it.  I love travel writing, and Wisner’s extensive mileage and precise recollection of certain places and events had me itching to pack my bags.  Wisner is equally good at describing the people he encountered on his travels, and it’s no surprise that Kurt is the supporting player who comes most alive in these pages.  Wisner’s ex-fiancee Annie is also well-drawn, though I found nothing remotely attractive or charming about her.  That isn’t to say Wisner’s portrayal of her is a hatchet job.  On the contrary, he still writes about her lovingly, wistfully–yet she still seemed like an icy bitch to me.  Wisner himself comes off as a bit of a snob, but one who becomes a bit more self-aware of his priggishness on his journey.

You wouldn’t know it from the title, but I think the most fascinating relationship in the book is between the Wisner brothers and their grandmother, LaRue, who chronicles their voyages on a world map in her nursing home.  While Franz’s parents worry about whether he has health insurance and how he plans to secure employment after this wallet-crushing, two-year sabbatical, LaRue and her peers only want to know where the boys are going next.

~ T

Book Review: “Significant Others” by Armistead Maupin

When I wasn’t hunting down baseball players in Florida, I was reading on the beach.  Predictably, I was tearing through another portion of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, Significant Others.  There were some noticeable differences between Significant Others and the previous Tales books, but I think they all served to make the story better.

Significant Others is the first Tales book that does not take place exclusively in San Francisco.  For this installment, Maupin’s favorite characters find themselves out in the California wilderness, trying to recapture their counter-culture spirit as the 1980′s hit their peak.  What’s most telling is who Maupin chooses to leave behind: Mrs. Madrigal, who is fighting to save her precious Barbary Lane from city developers, and Mary Ann, who has brought shame to them all by becoming the embodiment of the yuppie ethos.

Another change is that while the previous collections had been about these characters searching for relationships, Significant Others is, appropriately, about how these characters sustain them.  Brian finds himself growing resentful of Mary Ann’s success, and thinks that a few days apart would benefit them both.  So, he accepts Michael’s invitation to stay at a friend’s cabin, even though Michael has also invited his first new love interest since John died.  DeDe and D’orothea have a welcome return to the proceedings, as they travel to a comically liberated women’s only retreat where their marriage is put to the test.  The rest of the plot is put into motion (and twisted and tangled and overlapped) by some of the best new characters Maupin has yet created to add to the Tales tapestry: Michael’s crush, Thack; DeDe’s step-father, Booter; and Wren Douglas, the world’s most desired plus-size celebrity.

Maupin again strikes the balance of timeless and timely in this work.  Significant Others confronts the AIDS crisis head-on, and the tenor of the times informs much of the action.  Significant Others is also like the previous Tales novels in that it is compulsively readable, wonderfully written, and hilariously funny.

~ T

Book Review: “Henry Clay: The Essential American” by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler

After about three months, I finally finished the next part of my American history lesson: David and Jeanne Heidler’s Henry Clay: The Essential American.  I’ll ask the authors to forgive me if I suggest a few other superlatives to bestow upon Mr. Clay; words like egotist, hypocrite, and power-hungry .

Despite the authors’ transparent attempt to fix a halo and wings on Mr. Clay, the truth is that their research reveals a man who was something of a professional asshole for the greater part of his career.  Allow me to break it down for you in a fraction of the time the Heidlers did…

• Henry Clay built his law career by taking on only the most sensational cases that Lexington, Kentucky had to offer.  He was a consummate courtroom ringmaster, and his award-worthy performances meant he rarely lost a case–not even the case in which he a defended a woman who shot her sister-in-law point-blank in the face over $5, in the company of multiple witnesses.
• Being the Johnnie Cochran of Kentucky wasn’t enough to build a reputation, so Henry Clay decided to marry up.  He wooed plain jane Lucretia Hart and married into her well-to-do family.  Yes, they would grow to have a genuine and loving relationship, but life as Mrs. Clay was not easy for Lucretia.  She outlived most of her children, and had little interest in being a society wife.  In the latter half of Henry’s career, Lucretia rarely accompanied him to Washington, busy as she was tending to their extensive property and multiple orphaned grandchildren.

Long-suffering Lucretia

• Clay was the lawyer who successfully defended Aaron Burr during his first treason trial (yea, remember that?).  When Burr was brought up on such charges a second time, Clay was already ascendant in Kentucky politics, and decided to take a pass.
• Clay’s first job in Washington, as one of the youngest senators in history, came not on the heels of some sweeping electoral victory, but as an assignment as a seat filler.  Yeah.  John Breckinridge resigned to become the Attorney General, and the Kentucky legislature sent young Henry to D.C. to complete his term.  To his devious credit, Clay made the most of his first year in the capital.
• The position of Speaker of the House would not be what it is today had it not been for Henry Clay.  This may be his most important legacy.  Prior to Clay’s tenure, the Speaker was nothing more than a debate moderator.  When Henry returned to Washington under his own steam in 1811, he was nearly unanimously elected to the post, and quickly set about using his gavel as a bludgeon.  He bent or abused the rules of procedure to stifle congressional opposition, and he wasn’t shy about taking the fight to the White House, either.
• Clay’s contentious relationships with the men who resided on Pennsylvania Avenue is a truly astonishing trend.  He pressured Madison into declaring the War of 1812.  When Monroe passed him over for Secretary of State, Clay held the grudge until the next president was elected.  Clay’s relationship with Monroe’s successor, John Quincy Adams, warrants its own bullet point, as does his personal and professional vendetta against Andrew Jackson.  He couldn’t stomach Van Buren either, due to his complacency with Jackson’s administration.  William Henry Harrison beat Clay out for the Whig Party’s presidential nomination at the eleventh hour , only to drop dead a month into his term.  Insult was added to injury when Clay quickly learned that Vice President Tyler did not actually believe in any component of the party’s platform, leading to months of knock-down, drag-out legislative battles.  He would be bested in general and primary elections by Polk and Taylor, respectively, and never let his wounded pride heal.  In fact, the only president he got along with was Millard Fillmore; but by that time, Clay was too old and weak to put up his trademark fights.

John Quincy Adams. He's so judging you right now.

• Clay and John Quincy Adams were like The Odd Couple.  Clay was a jocular, grinning, and plainspoken advocate of the American everyman.  Adams was a dour, anti-social, elitist who looked down his nose at anyone who couldn’t speak Latin (granted, he did take himself entirely too seriously).  The two men were charged with negotiating the Treaty of Ghent at the close of the War of 1812, and their clashing, outsize personalities almost threatened to subvert the peace.  The only thing they had in common was their selfishness.  They would call a truce long enough to engage in a scandal known forever after as the Corrupt Bargain, in which the indecisive presidential election of 1824 would be tipped in Adams’ favor by Speaker Clay, in exchange for the latter’s installation as Secretary of State.  Once Adams left the White House, though, they went back to having very little use for each other.  (P.S: Here’s an outrageously entertaining song that encapsulates that affair)
• Clay got along no better with his peers in the House or Senate.  As Speaker, he took particular joy in tormenting John Randolph (an acknowledged nuisance).  John Calhoun was a favored comrade in their early days, but Clay broke off professional and personal contact with the gentleman from South Carolina over their opposing viewpoints on nullification and emancipation.  Daniel Webster could have been a true ally, had his ambitions not been as craven as Clay’s.  When the Whig cabinet resigned in protest over President Tyler’s stonewalling regarding the national bank charter, Secretary of State Webster was the only one who did not quit his post, and was thus immediately positioned as the front-runner in the next election.  Clay never forgave him, nor did he forgive his friend and assumed protegé John Crittenden, when the junior senator from Kentucky dared to wonder if perhaps the third time would not be the charm for presidential candidate Clay.
• Henry Clay is memorialized with the title of The Great Compromiser.  The Great Procrastinator would be a more appropriate one.  The legendary agreements he brokered in Congress, the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, were merely stop-gap measures that only delayed the inevitable discussion of the national abolition of slavery.  Clay prided himself on having saved the union not once but twice with his parliamentary prowess, but the fact of the matter is that he was only reinforcing a shoddy dam against the rising tide of civil war.
• Maybe the reason Clay couldn’t take a bolder stand in those instances was because of his own deeply contradictory views on slavery.  All his life, Clay owned slaves.  Yet he publicly denounced the practice, and was the president of the American Colonization Society, a charity that sought to provide freedmen with the means to return to Africa.  However, he thought abolitionists were just reckless anarchists looking to stir the pot.  He defended slavery in the South by claiming it was an economic necessity.  He pressured the North to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act, which said all white Americans were legally bound to report runaway slaves who fled from the South.  Clay’s efforts with the aforementioned Compromises were not disingenuous, but the Heidlers acknowledge that even Clay could read the writing on the wall.  But as long as he remained a kind master to his own slaves, Henry Clay wasn’t about to upset the apple cart over slavery–particularly if it endangered his chances at the presidency.

The Western Star, in his fading days

Perhaps you think I’m being to hard on Harry of the West.  There were times I sympathized with him.  The numerous tragedies that afflicted his children could not have been easy to bear.  No easier for a man of such legendary mental faculties could have been the growing doubt about the condition of his mind in his later life, and the eventual abandonment by those who looked at him as an invalid relic.  Regardless of these personal traumas, the only time that I thought the Heidlers were actually justified in portraying Clay as the noble hero came when Andrew Jackson arrived on the scene at the close of the War of 1812.

Hair and wardrobe by the Evil League of Evil

I would guess that the only thing most people know about Andrew Jackson is that his pursed lips and Doc Brown hairstyle grace our $20 bills.  But holy flying fuckballs, you guys–Andrew Jackson was a goddamn psychopath.  And I’m not just talking about the forcible Native American relocation policies that went into effect once he sat in the Oval Office.  No, this guy was long gone long before he came to Washington.  His victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans actually happened after Clay and Adams had finished their work at Ghent.  He then marched his troops to Georgia on a victory tour and decided on his own accord to invade parts of Spanish Florida.  For good measure, he slaughtered scores of Seminoles and also executed two British merchants, for no better reason than that they just happened to be in the area and he was having a really shitty day.  Jackson routinely settled disagreements with fists and knives, and held complete and utter disdain for politics.  He only went along with the plans to make him a presidential candidate because he was an unwavering control freak and he enjoyed watching people bend all the way over to kiss his ass.  I can almost forgive Clay’s blatant federal electoral fraud in light of the Jacksonians’ policies and practices.  Suffice to say, when Jackson finally won the presidency in 1828, he and Clay spent Jackson’s entire tenure at each other’s throats.

There was a lot to learn in Henry Clay: The Essential American, but it was not density alone that stretched my reading time.  The book is not very well written.  I meant that in terms beyond its rose-colored view of Clay’s life and career.  There are structural faults here.  For one thing, Clay dies on page 491 and the book ends of 492.  There is virtually no summation of his life and contributions, no estimation of the impact of his legacy, and no details regarding the immediate effects of his passing.  Yes, the Heidlers pause after major events in their chronology to explain their significance, but the ending is nevertheless distractingly abrupt.  Their prose is also entirely too flowery for non-fiction.  Their efforts to ramp up the drama with foreboding, single sentence conclusions to chapters is the stuff of James Patterson and Dan Brown.  The Heidlers should have taken a tip from Catherine Allgor and let the drama inherent in their subject speak for itself.

~ T

Book Review: “Babycakes” by Armistead Maupin

Here’s that second belated book review…

I finished the year out by revisiting my favorite fictional friends on Barbary Lane.  The fourth book in his San Franciscan saga, Armistead Maupin’s Babycakes is markedly different from its predecessors.  For one thing, the action moves far beyond that lovely city on the bay.  For another, the giddy hedonism of the previous volumes has given way to an uncomfortable new normal.  It’s the 1980s now, and none of Mrs. Madrigal’s “children” are quite the same.

The focus is noticeably narrower this time.  One plot follows Mary Ann and Brian, now married, as they face the multiple complications that come with preparing for a child: career choices, reproductive issues, and a distracting new tenant on Barbary Lane.  The other plot follows Michael as he journeys to England, attempting to clear his head and find his center after the death of his lover, Dr. John Fielding.  Maupin reserves most of his typical campy mystery for Michael’s story, to varying results.  His trademark coincidences are fewer and less clever this time out.

Nevertheless, Michael’s story proves to be more enjoyable.  Maupin puts Mary Ann through her paces, and leads her to some surprising choices, which left me feeling a little betrayed.  After all this time in San Francisco, has Mary Ann finally stooped to the level of scheming and deceit that so shocked her when she arrived?  Taking your point-of-view character down that road is a risky choice.  There’s a happy resolution to their troubles, but it comes with Maupin’s most glaring deus ex machina yet.  As for Michael’s tale, it’s not as good as those that have come before, but his acquaintance with a brash gay youth, his reminisces of his own younger days on holiday in the UK, and his long overdue reunion with Mona hit all the right notes.

It’s not that I found Babycakes to be disappointing.  It was just an unexpected change of pace from an author whom I had previously found so reliably entertaining.  His characters remain brilliant, lively creations, and they’ll keep me coming back throughout 2011 to finish the saga.

~ T

Book Review: “A Perfect Union” by Catherine Allgor

Here’s the first of two book reviews I should have published before the holidays…

In continuing my do-it-yourself survey of American history by reading about people who weren’t presidents, I picked up Catherine Allgor’s biography of Dolley Madison.  In A Perfect Union, Allgor meticulously details the life of Mrs. Madison, from her unusual Quaker youth, to her young adulthood in Philadelphia, through the tragedies of her first marriage, and on to her fascinating partnership with James Madison, a marriage that would present her with opportunities and privileges never before available to an American woman.

Make no mistake, A Perfect Union is a long and dense read, but it never feels tedious.  Allgor expertly crafts a captivating narrative from the facts of Mrs. Madison’s life.  It helps tremendously that Dolley had a very interesting and unique existence.  Allgor highlights this by painting a clear picture of what life was like for a woman in Revolutionary times.

Allgor’s main thesis (if there can be such a thing in a biography) is to prove that Dolley Madison was the most influential woman in America during the nation’s formative years.  Thanks to Allgor’s exhaustive research, that claim seems hard to deny.  The Madisons came to the city of Washington when it was little more than a dirt road lined by ramshackle office buildings and boarding houses.  As James worked to stabilize the government for which the city was created, Dolley undertook a parallel mission to bring culture to the mud-covered capital.  By creating the Washington social scene, Dolley was able to place herself at its center, and soon began to make use of her advantageous position.  Washington society became an alternate conduit to power, and Allgor argues that the nation, and its way of doing business, have never been the same since.

Hello, Dolley!

Of course, Allgor gives Dolley the benefit of hindsight, and never sees her actions as morally corrosive or anti-democratic, as some of Dolley’s own contemporaries did.  For some people, including Thomas Jefferson, the creation of an American aristocracy was fundamentally counterintuitive to the republican experiment; but as Allgor details, plenty of what Jefferson and his supporters did ran counterintuitive to the ideals of the Revolution.

Still, she does not shy from Dolley’s faults.  While a consummate hostess and ideal patron, Dolley was also a terribly possessive sister and a criminally forgiving mother.  Her son, Payne, bankrupted himself many times over, and Allgor blames the loss of priceless papers and possessions of the Madisons on Payne’s attempts to generate cash.  Mrs. Madison also remained silent on the hypocrisy of slavery in America, even as the earliest abolitionists sought her support in her retirement.

Allgor’s A Perfect Union is populated with other memorable historic figures: the beleaguered Albert Gallatin, fiery upstart John Randolph, maniacal Sir George Cockburn, Dolley’s loyal White House staff, and her husband himself, of course.  Dolley also shared her life with other extraordinary women: fellow political wives like Hannah Nicholson Gallatin and Margaret Bayard Smith, girlhood friends like Eliza Collins Lee, and her own sisters, Anna and Mary.  But none hold a candle to Dolley.  She kept an entire city humming and grounded, whether it was suffering the strains of partisan politics or outright destruction at the hands of vengeful invaders. She set the bar for what was to be expected of a First Lady, and by extension discreetly led the way towards female empowerment in the public sphere.  According to Catherine Allgor, Dolley Madison was more than an example of what a woman could be in America; she was the embodiment of American strength, virtue, and honor herself.

Editor’s Note: PBS’s American Experience aired an excellent program last year about Mrs. Madison, featuring commentary from Ms. Allgor, among others.  You can watch it here.

~ T

Book Review: “The Sparrow” by Mary Doria Russell

I apologize if the blog’s been rather repetitive this past few weeks.  I promise, I’ve been doing more than just managing the football pool and watching Glee.  You can expect some belated evidence of my other activities coming this week.

First up, a book review.  After the taxing colonial non-fiction, I decided to pick up something more imaginative.  The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, was an excellent read.  It was some of the best science fiction I’ve read in a while; yet I would not hesitate to say that this is a piece for readers of all stripes.  Russell takes on one of sci-fi’s oldest premises–first contact with alien life–and tells that story with sophisticated, believable, and frightening realism.

Russell wisely takes her cue from history.  In the past, who were among those to establish relationships between cultures around the globe?  Typically, they were warriors, privateers, or missionaries.  As such, in Russell’s future, the first expedition to an alien world is launched not by a nation, or by an international body, but by the Jesuit Order.  After a series of serendipitous events bring together an unconventional priest, a young astronomer, a retired aerospace engineer, his doctor wife, and a remarkable computer analyst on the eve of the discovery of life beyond our solar system, the Society of Jesus covertly sanctions a mission to send this divinely assembled group to  meet God’s other children.  What they find is not what they expect: a primitive culture living collectively off of and in harmony with nature.  As they learn to live among this society, the group of human explorers struggles to understand the impact their presence is having.  When the messengers they came looking for finally make themselves known, this cultural divide becomes dangerous.

Russell succeeds in using the premise as it was intended: to ask big questions about our own civilization.  How would the fact that we are not alone affect people of faith?  What would be done with the knowledge gained from this alien culture?  Could we understand their customs and social interactions with our own limited context?  Would we be greeted with fear or courtesy?  What assumptions or misunderstandings would need to be avoided?  They’re all daring questions, and Russell addresses them with deceptive ease.

I should warn you that most of what transpires leads to tragedy (some of it quite graphic), but somehow The Sparrow refrains from pessimism.  Russell’s point, in recounting the mission to the planet Rakhat, is simply that no amount of planning and no lack of goodwill would be enough to keep such an encounter from going awry.  The unknown variables would be too great for even the most perceptive of minds to anticipate.  It’s sad but historically true.

Russell is to be commended for her imaginative world-building.  I refer not only to the Runa and Jana’ata societies on wild Rakhat, but to her depiction of mid-21st century Earth.  The picture she paints is a cautionary extrapolation of the present day; a world in which corporations control science, in which a lack of trees prohibits the printing of books, and in which religious terrorism is alive and well.  Russell populates these worlds with vividly drawn characters, crafted lovingly and with sophistication.  It’s over 100 pages before first contact comes, but it is Russell’s characters that hold you to the narrative.

Overall, I recommend The Sparrow.  You don’t have to be a sci-fi fan for this one.  It’s more Carl Sagan than Steven Spielberg, and it will stick with you for a while.

~ T