Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Art Winslow discusses nonfiction finalist Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)

By 1921, Henry Ford’s company had a lock on more than half the U.S. automobile market, turning out 2 million Model Ts a year, with a cost of production 60% lower than it had a decade beforehand. This was not the “race to the bottom” of today’s globalism, searching for the cheapest possible labor, either, for when Ford announced he would pay workers an incentive $5 dollars a day, it was twice the industry standard of the time. It was not the production line per se but the close and careful choreographing of multiple processes simultaneously that allowed for the industrial efficiency, the approach that came to be known as “Fordism,” as Greg Grandin explains in Fordlandia.

Grandin’s book is an account of a Ford project little known today, the establishment of a rubber plantation on a tributary of the Amazon in the Brazilian jungle, but along the way it also presents a lucid and nuanced analysis of the contradictions built into Ford’s brand of paternalized capitalism. Even as he catalogues its failures, Grandin notes that Ford’s impulses toward social engineering “compare well with what is available in much of the world today.”

Over the course of nearly two decades, Henry Ford pumped tens of millions of dollars into funding two American towns in Brazil, “complete with central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospitals, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, golf courses, and of course Model Ts and As rolling down their paved streets,” Grandin writes. (Ford, born on a farm in Michigan, hated cows; today one of those golf courses is grazeland for cattle.)

The major purchase of Brazilian property, on the shore of the Tapajos River, was roughly sketched out by two employees Ford sent there in 1927, who drew a line on the map encompassing 5,625 square miles. The state of Para ended up ceding Ford slightly less, but the nearly 2.5 million-acre swath was about the size of Connecticut, and the half that represented public land was given to Ford free, the government was so eager for development in its backwater regions.

Ford understood “that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumers.” In an ideal sense Ford was an admirer of Emerson, and he pictured in his methods a kind of holism that Grandin interprets as “an American pastoralism that didn’t oppose nature and industrialization, or man and the machine, but saw each fulfilling the other. “ Yet “both his car and his factory system worked against the world he hoped to bring into being,” Grandin asserts.

The eccentricities and worse of the man—Ford’s anti-Semitism, for example—are well explored by Grandin, who rounds out his chronicle of hubris and steady slippage in the Amazon (including uprisings by the workers) with accounts of Ford’s penchant for attempting to create self-sustaining village industries and planned communities, several of those in Michigan. When production of latex proved extremely problematic, Ford’s mission was then rationalized as a civilizing one. Ford hated FDR’s New Deal, but the 1930 revolution in Brazil that brought Getulio Vargas to power, propelling pro-labor, FDR-style legislation, helped him a great deal, but one of the multiple ironies in Fordlandia.

As Grandin sees it, “Born more from political frustration at home than from the need to acquire control over yet another raw material abroad, Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and Americanism.”

Click here to read an excerpt from Fordlandia.

Click here to watch Greg Grandin discuss Fordlandia (courtesy of Democracy Now!)

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: fordlandia, greg grandin

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Art Winslow discusses nonfiction finalist Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)

By 1921, Henry Ford’s company had a lock on more than half the U.S. automobile market, turning out 2 million Model Ts a year, with a cost of production 60% lower than it had a decade beforehand. This was not the “race to the bottom” of today’s globalism, searching for the cheapest possible labor, either, for when Ford announced he would pay workers an incentive $5 dollars a day, it was twice the industry standard of the time. It was not the production line per se but the close and careful choreographing of multiple processes simultaneously that allowed for the industrial efficiency, the approach that came to be known as “Fordism,” as Greg Grandin explains in Fordlandia.

Grandin’s book is an account of a Ford project little known today, the establishment of a rubber plantation on a tributary of the Amazon in the Brazilian jungle, but along the way it also presents a lucid and nuanced analysis of the contradictions built into Ford’s brand of paternalized capitalism. Even as he catalogues its failures, Grandin notes that Ford’s impulses toward social engineering “compare well with what is available in much of the world today.”

Over the course of nearly two decades, Henry Ford pumped tens of millions of dollars into funding two American towns in Brazil, “complete with central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospitals, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, golf courses, and of course Model Ts and As rolling down their paved streets,” Grandin writes. (Ford, born on a farm in Michigan, hated cows; today one of those golf courses is grazeland for cattle.)

The major purchase of Brazilian property, on the shore of the Tapajos River, was roughly sketched out by two employees Ford sent there in 1927, who drew a line on the map encompassing 5,625 square miles. The state of Para ended up ceding Ford slightly less, but the nearly 2.5 million-acre swath was about the size of Connecticut, and the half that represented public land was given to Ford free, the government was so eager for development in its backwater regions.

Ford understood “that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumers.” In an ideal sense Ford was an admirer of Emerson, and he pictured in his methods a kind of holism that Grandin interprets as “an American pastoralism that didn’t oppose nature and industrialization, or man and the machine, but saw each fulfilling the other. “ Yet “both his car and his factory system worked against the world he hoped to bring into being,” Grandin asserts.

The eccentricities and worse of the man—Ford’s anti-Semitism, for example—are well explored by Grandin, who rounds out his chronicle of hubris and steady slippage in the Amazon (including uprisings by the workers) with accounts of Ford’s penchant for attempting to create self-sustaining village industries and planned communities, several of those in Michigan. When production of latex proved extremely problematic, Ford’s mission was then rationalized as a civilizing one. Ford hated FDR’s New Deal, but the 1930 revolution in Brazil that brought Getulio Vargas to power, propelling pro-labor, FDR-style legislation, helped him a great deal, but one of the multiple ironies in Fordlandia.

As Grandin sees it, “Born more from political frustration at home than from the need to acquire control over yet another raw material abroad, Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and Americanism.”

Click here to read an excerpt from Fordlandia.

Click here to watch Greg Grandin discuss Fordlandia (courtesy of Democracy Now!)

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: greg grandin, fordlandia

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Carlin Romano discusses biography finalist Stanislao G. Pugliese's Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (FSG)   In a literary world where only one Italian intellectual gets to be world-famous at a time, Ignazio Silone (1900-78) enjoyed that perch in the middle years of the 20th century. Although the literature Nobels in his lifetime went to Deledda, Pirandello, Quasimodo and Montale, Silone's complex profile—novelist, activist, editor, political theorist, former communist turned gently anti-communist tribune of socialism—made him an authoritative and admired figure. Praised by the likes of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell, he died with the aura of "classic author" about him, his 1930s novels Fontamara and Bread and Wine translated everywhere.   With the notable exception of Primo Levi, whose well-earned American apotheosis led to multiple biographies in English, modern Italian novelists and intellectuals rarely find an American biographer, let alone one with the grasp of Italian intellectual culture possessed by the fine Hofstra historian Stanislao Pugliese. His Bitter Spring is a gift, the first thorough study of Silone in English. Anyone especially interested in Italian literature or mid-century European intellectual history should be even more grateful, for Pugliese does the best job yet of explaining a man who seemed inexplicable even to his Irish wife of three decades, Darina Laracy.   Having lost both his parents and 5 of 6 siblings by the age of 14, the writer born Secondino Tranquilli in Pescina dei Marsi, Italy—an Abruzzo town devastated by a 1915 earthquake that killed his mother and some 70 percent of its  populace—grew up with a profound sense of life's injustice and a forceful determination to fight it. A co-founder of Italy's Communist Party at 21, he became a commited opponent of Mussolini at home.   One of the many aliases he took on as a roaming Italian Communist activist—"Ignazio Silone," which he chose while languishing in a Spanish jail in 1923—would later become his nom de plume. A 1927 visit to Moscow , during which he quickly intuited the advancing authoritarianism of Stalin as the latter turned on Trotsky, spurred Silone's questioning of doctrinaire communism. By 1931, clinically depressed and expelled from the Italian Communist Party because of his independent stands, Silone turned to expressing his anti-fascism in committed, realist fiction written during exile in Switzerland. Skeptical, savvy, cosmopolitan, yet ever drawn to the humble  Catholicism exemplified by St. Francis and the spiritual, ascetic Celestines, Silone, with Fontamara and Bread and Wine, captured the fight for justice of Abruzzese peasants armed with Catholic folk wisdom, trickle-down Marxism, and little else.

After World War II, Silone became Italy's leading liberal intellectual, co-editing the prestigious journal Tempo Presente from 1956 until 1968 when he learned, to his dismay, of its covert funding from the CIA. He resigned and thereafter devoted himself wholly to writing. After his death, in 1996, another controversy broke out about Silone's loyalties when Italian historian Dario Biocca found letters suggesting that Silone may have been a minor informer for the Fascist Party during his 20s. The issue remains cloudy. The whole of Silone's life better indicates that whatever favors he may have traded with a Fascist policeman for specific purposes, and whether he was a double agent or a triple agent, he was never, ideologically, a Fascist sympathizer. A fairer assessment was the one delivered by Italy's president upon Silone's death in 1978: Pescina's cultural warrior as the "noble, rigorous, inflexible, democratic conscience of contemporary Italian culture."

Pugliese untangles and evaluates the still mysterious threads of Silone's secretive life and undercover affiliations better than anyone so far. More important, he brings back to life a writer whose reputation has unfairly receded. Like Camus, who once remarked to Simone Weil's mother that Silone deserved the Nobel Prize more than he did, Silone tolerated no acolytes or disciples, and resisted invitations to power. (He declined the posts of Italian ambassador to France and head of Italian state broadcasting.) Silone never developed literary worshippers who might have kept his flame alive. Bitter Spring eloquently unpacks why so many distinguished figures of art and culture saw kindred greatness in the man who flintily described himself as "a Socialist without a Party, a Christian without a Church."   Click here to read an excerpt from Bitter Spring.
  Click here to watch Stanislao Pugliese discuss Bitter Spring.   The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: stanislao pugliese, ignazio silone

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Carlin Romano discusses biography finalist Stanislao G. Pugliese's Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (FSG)   In a literary world where only one Italian intellectual gets to be world-famous at a time, Ignazio Silone (1900-78) enjoyed that perch in the middle years of the 20th century. Although the literature Nobels in his lifetime went to Deledda, Pirandello, Quasimodo and Montale, Silone's complex profile—novelist, activist, editor, political theorist, former communist turned gently anti-communist tribune of socialism—made him an authoritative and admired figure. Praised by the likes of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell, he died with the aura of "classic author" about him, his 1930s novels Fontamara and Bread and Wine translated everywhere.   With the notable exception of Primo Levi, whose well-earned American apotheosis led to multiple biographies in English, modern Italian novelists and intellectuals rarely find an American biographer, let alone one with the grasp of Italian intellectual culture possessed by the fine Hofstra historian Stanislao Pugliese. His Bitter Spring is a gift, the first thorough study of Silone in English. Anyone especially interested in Italian literature or mid-century European intellectual history should be even more grateful, for Pugliese does the best job yet of explaining a man who seemed inexplicable even to his Irish wife of three decades, Darina Laracy.   Having lost both his parents and 5 of 6 siblings by the age of 14, the writer born Secondino Tranquilli in Pescina dei Marsi, Italy—an Abruzzo town devastated by a 1915 earthquake that killed his mother and some 70 percent of its  populace—grew up with a profound sense of life's injustice and a forceful determination to fight it. A co-founder of Italy's Communist Party at 21, he became a commited opponent of Mussolini at home.   One of the many aliases he took on as a roaming Italian Communist activist—"Ignazio Silone," which he chose while languishing in a Spanish jail in 1923—would later become his nom de plume. A 1927 visit to Moscow , during which he quickly intuited the advancing authoritarianism of Stalin as the latter turned on Trotsky, spurred Silone's questioning of doctrinaire communism. By 1931, clinically depressed and expelled from the Italian Communist Party because of his independent stands, Silone turned to expressing his anti-fascism in committed, realist fiction written during exile in Switzerland. Skeptical, savvy, cosmopolitan, yet ever drawn to the humble  Catholicism exemplified by St. Francis and the spiritual, ascetic Celestines, Silone, with Fontamara and Bread and Wine, captured the fight for justice of Abruzzese peasants armed with Catholic folk wisdom, trickle-down Marxism, and little else.

After World War II, Silone became Italy's leading liberal intellectual, co-editing the prestigious journal Tempo Presente from 1956 until 1968 when he learned, to his dismay, of its covert funding from the CIA. He resigned and thereafter devoted himself wholly to writing. After his death, in 1996, another controversy broke out about Silone's loyalties when Italian historian Dario Biocca found letters suggesting that Silone may have been a minor informer for the Fascist Party during his 20s. The issue remains cloudy. The whole of Silone's life better indicates that whatever favors he may have traded with a Fascist policeman for specific purposes, and whether he was a double agent or a triple agent, he was never, ideologically, a Fascist sympathizer. A fairer assessment was the one delivered by Italy's president upon Silone's death in 1978: Pescina's cultural warrior as the "noble, rigorous, inflexible, democratic conscience of contemporary Italian culture."

Pugliese untangles and evaluates the still mysterious threads of Silone's secretive life and undercover affiliations better than anyone so far. More important, he brings back to life a writer whose reputation has unfairly receded. Like Camus, who once remarked to Simone Weil's mother that Silone deserved the Nobel Prize more than he did, Silone tolerated no acolytes or disciples, and resisted invitations to power. (He declined the posts of Italian ambassador to France and head of Italian state broadcasting.) Silone never developed literary worshippers who might have kept his flame alive. Bitter Spring eloquently unpacks why so many distinguished figures of art and culture saw kindred greatness in the man who flintily described himself as "a Socialist without a Party, a Christian without a Church."   Click here to read an excerpt from Bitter Spring.
  Click here to watch Stanislao Pugliese discuss Bitter Spring.   The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: ignazio silone, stanislao pugliese

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Eric Banks discusses nonfiction finalist Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin)

In The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger relates a Tamil story retold by her late colleague A.K. Ramanujan that could serve as a metaphor for her enterprise. The Brahmin wife of a sage is sentenced to death by her husband. At the moment she is to be beheaded, she embraces a Pariah, and both are decapitated. When the husband remorsefully restores them to subsequent life, their heads are transposed by mistake—and the resulting Brahmin-with-a-Pariah-head and Pariah-with-a-Brahmin-head require a unique set of sacrificial practices. “Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a felix culpa.” Drawing on that felicitous fault—the mismatched heads a proxy for mixtures of caste but also the pure-gods-go-crazy meeting of southern India and north, the boomerang between earthy folklore and venerated text --Doniger asks “not where the disparate elements originate but why they were put together and why kept together. The political implications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodge-podge or, on the other hand, culturally homogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier, to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations.”

Trickier is an understatement in The Hindus: Like any good recovering Orientalist, Doniger is profoundly moved by her subject’s polyvalent inclusiveness and radical plurality, its sometimes impossible-to-square dualities, its centuries-long knack for sticking the wrong head on the wrong body. The history she tells in The Hindus--which is very different from saying “her history of the Hindus”--involves as one might imagine vigorous explorations of the Rig Veda, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and those epics of the Indian imaginary, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But what makes The Hindus a stunning and audacious work of cultural history is her equal commitment to that little tagline of the subhead: “An Alternative History.” In focusing on the experiences and representations of women and the outcast/outcaste Dalits as well as the fluctuating symbolic, economic, and sacrificial place of various animal species (particularly horses, cows, and dogs) across epochs, Doniger’s story alternates like a Slinky in perspectives and values and meanings—and portrays a Hinduism absorbing and refracting a cluster of heterogeneous practices.

For all its historical sweep, The Hindus is a surprisingly personal text, written with vivacious pluck and playful verve. Doniger switches back and forth between a lens wide enough to pack in the panorama of several centuries of subcontinental dynastic history and conquest and one microscopically sharp enough to sort through the granular life in the hoariest myth. Whether writing on bhakti devotional practices of the South or the complicated aftermath of Raj Orientalism, Doniger never misses the bigger picture for the intimate or allows the broad view to get in the way of the key detail. Much as the dynamics of exclusion are a central—maybe the central—part of her interpretation and understanding of the religious complexes of South Asia, The Hindus is acutely sensitive to delve into much in addition to the canon of revered texts. (“To the accusation," she writes, "that I cited a part of the Hindu textual tradition that one Hindu ‘had never heard of,’ my reply is: Yes!, and it’s my intention to go on doing just that.”)

The Hindus is the passionate distillation of a career’s work by one of the most accomplished Sanskritists of the past century, a generous and ambitious and gregarious book. As she writes about placing the Ramayana in its historical context, she amply shows how “the human imagination transformed the actual circumstance of the historical period into something far more beautiful, terrible, challenging, and elevating than the circumstances themselves.” At a moment when fundamentalisms of all stripes make absolutist demands on the imagination, Wendy Doniger’s gift of The Hindus stands as a blessed alternative.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Hindus.

Click here to read an interview with Wendy Doniger on The Hindus.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: wendy doniger, the hindus

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Eric Banks discusses nonfiction finalist Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin)

In The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger relates a Tamil story retold by her late colleague A.K. Ramanujan that could serve as a metaphor for her enterprise. The Brahmin wife of a sage is sentenced to death by her husband. At the moment she is to be beheaded, she embraces a Pariah, and both are decapitated. When the husband remorsefully restores them to subsequent life, their heads are transposed by mistake—and the resulting Brahmin-with-a-Pariah-head and Pariah-with-a-Brahmin-head require a unique set of sacrificial practices. “Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a felix culpa.” Drawing on that felicitous fault—the mismatched heads a proxy for mixtures of caste but also the pure-gods-go-crazy meeting of southern India and north, the boomerang between earthy folklore and venerated text --Doniger asks “not where the disparate elements originate but why they were put together and why kept together. The political implications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodge-podge or, on the other hand, culturally homogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier, to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations.”

Trickier is an understatement in The Hindus: Like any good recovering Orientalist, Doniger is profoundly moved by her subject’s polyvalent inclusiveness and radical plurality, its sometimes impossible-to-square dualities, its centuries-long knack for sticking the wrong head on the wrong body. The history she tells in The Hindus--which is very different from saying “her history of the Hindus”--involves as one might imagine vigorous explorations of the Rig Veda, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and those epics of the Indian imaginary, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But what makes The Hindus a stunning and audacious work of cultural history is her equal commitment to that little tagline of the subhead: “An Alternative History.” In focusing on the experiences and representations of women and the outcast/outcaste Dalits as well as the fluctuating symbolic, economic, and sacrificial place of various animal species (particularly horses, cows, and dogs) across epochs, Doniger’s story alternates like a Slinky in perspectives and values and meanings—and portrays a Hinduism absorbing and refracting a cluster of heterogeneous practices.

For all its historical sweep, The Hindus is a surprisingly personal text, written with vivacious pluck and playful verve. Doniger switches back and forth between a lens wide enough to pack in the panorama of several centuries of subcontinental dynastic history and conquest and one microscopically sharp enough to sort through the granular life in the hoariest myth. Whether writing on bhakti devotional practices of the South or the complicated aftermath of Raj Orientalism, Doniger never misses the bigger picture for the intimate or allows the broad view to get in the way of the key detail. Much as the dynamics of exclusion are a central—maybe the central—part of her interpretation and understanding of the religious complexes of South Asia, The Hindus is acutely sensitive to delve into much in addition to the canon of revered texts. (“To the accusation," she writes, "that I cited a part of the Hindu textual tradition that one Hindu ‘had never heard of,’ my reply is: Yes!, and it’s my intention to go on doing just that.”)

The Hindus is the passionate distillation of a career’s work by one of the most accomplished Sanskritists of the past century, a generous and ambitious and gregarious book. As she writes about placing the Ramayana in its historical context, she amply shows how “the human imagination transformed the actual circumstance of the historical period into something far more beautiful, terrible, challenging, and elevating than the circumstances themselves.” At a moment when fundamentalisms of all stripes make absolutist demands on the imagination, Wendy Doniger’s gift of The Hindus stands as a blessed alternative.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Hindus.

Click here to read an interview with Wendy Doniger on The Hindus.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: wendy doniger, the hindus

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Lizzie Skurnick discusses criticism finalist Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf)

What do a gentrifying lakeside Chicago neighborhood, the invention of telephone poles, NAFTA, and race-based adoption have in common? In Eula Biss’s book of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land, it’s the formation of America—but a vision of America antic, new and varied, and as far from a melting pot as Lake Michigan.

Essayist Eula Biss began her career as a poet, and Notes bears that lyric stamp, her deft prose taking on heavy-duty subjects in forms that camouflage their weight. In the essay "Time and Distance Overcome," Biss weaves the creation of the network of telephone poles with the history of lynching. Another subtle contrast comes in “Is This Kansas,” in which Biss recounts her time among the rowdy students of Iowa City and the treatment of New Orleans residents during Katrina. The most obscure pairing is the book's most affecting. In "No Man's Land," Biss mixes fragments of the pioneer story of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder with Biss’s experience as a new resident in the gentrifying Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. Able to draw insight from items as mundane as the bottle of Tide left on the sidewalk as a boy submits to a pat-down, Biss leaves us realizing our country remains gripped by the same myths, fears and enthusiasms since we've settled the prairie, only in modern, seemingly unremarkable forms.

By approaching her subjects sideways, Biss avoids sounding dry or clumsily political. But she also makes an implicit point—the story of our country is not straightforward, but one of unexpected siblings and strange adoptions, a story of change, adaptation, and surprising ancestry. In “Time and Distance Overcome,” Biss writes, “When I was young, I believed the arc and swoop of telephone wires was beautiful. Now, I tell my sister, those poles, these wires, do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.” After reading Notes from No Man’s Land, readers will have a hard time seeing America the same way, too.

Click here to see Eula Biss read from Notes from No Man's Land (courtesy Book TV).

Click here to read an excerpt from Notes from No Man's Land.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: eula biss, note's from no man's land

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Lizzie Skurnick discusses criticism finalist Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf)

What do a gentrifying lakeside Chicago neighborhood, the invention of telephone poles, NAFTA, and race-based adoption have in common? In Eula Biss’s book of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land, it’s the formation of America—but a vision of America antic, new and varied, and as far from a melting pot as Lake Michigan.

Essayist Eula Biss began her career as a poet, and Notes bears that lyric stamp, her deft prose taking on heavy-duty subjects in forms that camouflage their weight. In the essay "Time and Distance Overcome," Biss weaves the creation of the network of telephone poles with the history of lynching. Another subtle contrast comes in “Is This Kansas,” in which Biss recounts her time among the rowdy students of Iowa City and the treatment of New Orleans residents during Katrina. The most obscure pairing is the book's most affecting. In "No Man's Land," Biss mixes fragments of the pioneer story of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder with Biss’s experience as a new resident in the gentrifying Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. Able to draw insight from items as mundane as the bottle of Tide left on the sidewalk as a boy submits to a pat-down, Biss leaves us realizing our country remains gripped by the same myths, fears and enthusiasms since we've settled the prairie, only in modern, seemingly unremarkable forms.

By approaching her subjects sideways, Biss avoids sounding dry or clumsily political. But she also makes an implicit point—the story of our country is not straightforward, but one of unexpected siblings and strange adoptions, a story of change, adaptation, and surprising ancestry. In “Time and Distance Overcome,” Biss writes, “When I was young, I believed the arc and swoop of telephone wires was beautiful. Now, I tell my sister, those poles, these wires, do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.” After reading Notes from No Man’s Land, readers will have a hard time seeing America the same way, too.

Click here to see Eula Biss read from Notes from No Man's Land (courtesy Book TV).

Click here to read an excerpt from Notes from No Man's Land.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: eula biss, note's from no man's land

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher discusses criticism finalist David Hajdu's Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo)

David Hajdu is tough on contemporary music. He calls John Zorn "the living master of creative delusion." He describes "the unapologetic commercialism of Taylor Swift's music." Concluding his review of the long-awaited 2004 release of Brian Wilson's lost follow-up to the Beach Boys' seminal Pet Sounds, Hajdu says, "Smile, masterpiece or not, is still lost." Hajdu is a skeptic—it takes a lot to impress him, and he is deeply interested in how an artist's own self-delusions can impede the realization of a musical vision.  But, in thinking so hard about the juncture where personality and performance meet, Hajdu hears things in music most of us do not, the subtleties that are lost or are born in the gap between the sounds a musician thinks he or she is making and what a listener hears.

The central piece in this collection of essays and reviews (not just of music, but of cartoons, comics, movies, corporate culture, and online journalism) is an extended piece on Billy Eckstine, the jazz singer and bandleader whom Hajdu says "simply redefined what it meant to be black and a celebrity in America." In tracing Eckstine's rise and fall, Hajdu finds a representative life for illustrating how a society can fail its geniuses, or the other way around, which is, in fact, the overarching subject of this book.

It's an ambitious project, and Hajdu proves his point through the details. There's an incredibly moving essay about Wynton Marsalis, who showed up in New York in the early '80s and quickly became the popular figurehead of jazz, only to tarnish his crown a decade later with his own inflexible standards. Hajdu is able to sweep away all of Marsalis's holier-than-thou criticism of younger musicians when he finds the trumpeter playing anonymously in a New York club, where it becomes clear that, in spite of himself, Marsalis can really blow his horn. Again and again, in pieces about figures as different as Ray Charles and Harry Partch, Hajdu is able to get the artist out of the way of the music. He'll send you back to your record collection—or your iTunes library—and, after reading Heroes and Villains, you'll hear better.

Click here to read an excerpt from Heroes and Villains.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

 

Keyword tags: david hajdu, heroes and villains

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher discusses criticism finalist David Hajdu's Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo)

David Hajdu is tough on contemporary music. He calls John Zorn "the living master of creative delusion." He describes "the unapologetic commercialism of Taylor Swift's music." Concluding his review of the long-awaited 2004 release of Brian Wilson's lost follow-up to the Beach Boys' seminal Pet Sounds, Hajdu says, "Smile, masterpiece or not, is still lost." Hajdu is a skeptic—it takes a lot to impress him, and he is deeply interested in how an artist's own self-delusions can impede the realization of a musical vision.  But, in thinking so hard about the juncture where personality and performance meet, Hajdu hears things in music most of us do not, the subtleties that are lost or are born in the gap between the sounds a musician thinks he or she is making and what a listener hears.

The central piece in this collection of essays and reviews (not just of music, but of cartoons, comics, movies, corporate culture, and online journalism) is an extended piece on Billy Eckstine, the jazz singer and bandleader whom Hajdu says "simply redefined what it meant to be black and a celebrity in America." In tracing Eckstine's rise and fall, Hajdu finds a representative life for illustrating how a society can fail its geniuses, or the other way around, which is, in fact, the overarching subject of this book.

It's an ambitious project, and Hajdu proves his point through the details. There's an incredibly moving essay about Wynton Marsalis, who showed up in New York in the early '80s and quickly became the popular figurehead of jazz, only to tarnish his crown a decade later with his own inflexible standards. Hajdu is able to sweep away all of Marsalis's holier-than-thou criticism of younger musicians when he finds the trumpeter playing anonymously in a New York club, where it becomes clear that, in spite of himself, Marsalis can really blow his horn. Again and again, in pieces about figures as different as Ray Charles and Harry Partch, Hajdu is able to get the artist out of the way of the music. He'll send you back to your record collection—or your iTunes library—and, after reading Heroes and Villains, you'll hear better.

Click here to read an excerpt from Heroes and Villains.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

 

Keyword tags: david hajdu, heroes and villains

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Lizzie Skurnick discusses fiction finalist Michelle Huneven's Blame (Sarah Crichton/FSG)

What does it actually mean to take responsibility? That’s the provoking question of Michelle Huneven’s arresting Blame, in which the hard-drinking, ribald history professor Patsy MacLemoore kills a mother and daughter driving home after a night of carousing, then spends the rest of the novel trying to free herself from the wreckage.

When we meet Patsy, the arch, appealing intellect that has heretofore greased the wheels of her career has already begun its downward slide, visits to the drunk tank and mysteriously withdrawn job offers taking the place of promotions. Huneven’s spare, cutting prose—the counter to Patsy’s liquor-fueled, expansive good will—is equally adept at depicting Patsy’s love affair with the drink, the petty humiliations of jail (as Patsy bleeds through her underwear, a guard sitting in front of a shelf of maxi pads tells her they’re out), her time in AA, and her resulting marriage, a well-intentioned attempt to gain stability that turns, in short order, turns into perfunctory fidelity.

Though the plot of the novel seems built for the familiar arc of tragedy and redemption, Huneven is far more interested in the limited fruits of exactly such well-intentioned attempts. That impulse to seek stability—not how one finds it—the author returns to again and again, mapping out battles of the psyche, its fruitless attempts to gain purchase, its misguided achievements, its frequent delusions.

However dark are the far-reaching effects of Patsy’s crime, however vivid her sufferings, Huneven is not interested in redeeming Patsy, but in using the tragic event to explore the far more provoking question of whether, in blaming ourselves for the obvious, we avoid our true responsibilities. Was Patsy a murderer? There is an official plot twist that allows Patsy to consider herself something less, if she chooses. But it’s not the true surprise. The surprise is to leave us wondering if redemption is something to seek at all.

Click here to read an excerpt from Blame, courtesy of LA Weekly

Click here to hear Michelle Huneven discuss Blame on WNYC's "The Leonard Lopate Show"

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: michelle huneven, blame

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Lizzie Skurnick discusses fiction finalist Michelle Huneven's Blame (Sarah Crichton/FSG)

What does it actually mean to take responsibility? That’s the provoking question of Michelle Huneven’s arresting Blame, in which the hard-drinking, ribald history professor Patsy MacLemoore kills a mother and daughter driving home after a night of carousing, then spends the rest of the novel trying to free herself from the wreckage.

When we meet Patsy, the arch, appealing intellect that has heretofore greased the wheels of her career has already begun its downward slide, visits to the drunk tank and mysteriously withdrawn job offers taking the place of promotions. Huneven’s spare, cutting prose—the counter to Patsy’s liquor-fueled, expansive good will—is equally adept at depicting Patsy’s love affair with the drink, the petty humiliations of jail (as Patsy bleeds through her underwear, a guard sitting in front of a shelf of maxi pads tells her they’re out), her time in AA, and her resulting marriage, a well-intentioned attempt to gain stability that turns, in short order, turns into perfunctory fidelity.

Though the plot of the novel seems built for the familiar arc of tragedy and redemption, Huneven is far more interested in the limited fruits of exactly such well-intentioned attempts. That impulse to seek stability—not how one finds it—the author returns to again and again, mapping out battles of the psyche, its fruitless attempts to gain purchase, its misguided achievements, its frequent delusions.

However dark are the far-reaching effects of Patsy’s crime, however vivid her sufferings, Huneven is not interested in redeeming Patsy, but in using the tragic event to explore the far more provoking question of whether, in blaming ourselves for the obvious, we avoid our true responsibilities. Was Patsy a murderer? There is an official plot twist that allows Patsy to consider herself something less, if she chooses. But it’s not the true surprise. The surprise is to leave us wondering if redemption is something to seek at all.

Click here to read an excerpt from Blame, courtesy of LA Weekly

Click here to hear Michelle Huneven discuss Blame on WNYC's "The Leonard Lopate Show"

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: michelle huneven, blame

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Scott McLemee discusses criticism finalist Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)

The past is not always prologue, but it sure gets your attention at times. Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression appeared just after the spectre of total global financial collapse had passed—though even with stimulus and bailout, and all the band-aids in the world, it’s clear that we are in for a long period of brutally reduced expectations.

There is, of course, a familiar condensed mental newsreel of the years following the 1929 crash. It tends to linger on a handful of images: soup kitchens, picket lines, dance marathons, Henry Fonda’s speech at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, families listening to FDR on the radio, and (this sequence proves most diverting) scantily clad chorus girls doing intricate numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Dickstein’s expansive and elegant reconstruction of the period doesn’t just expand the catalog of items that should define our memory of the period. He examines the style, the imagery, and the rhythms of Depression culture, paying close attention to how literature, music, and film captured—and, in a way, created—the texture of life in hard times.

Dickstein reminds us that the first few years of the Depression were marked by a pronounced tendency by “responsible” members of government and mass media to downplay just how bad things were getting. (I do not mention this to make any contemporary point; perish the thought.) Documentary realism was not simply the natural way to record what was happening to the country. It was a way artists and writers could cut through the fantasies of normalcy and confront the actual state of the American Dream. At the same time, the manufacturers and vendors of that dream still had a market:

Migrant workers were grasping at survival, not reaching for freedom. This is one reason why photography became such a central mode of expression in the 1930s. The migrant pictures, with their sharp angles, their clashing lines, are all about going nowhere; the people are pinned like social specimens, frozen into postures that allow little movement, no escape.

The fantasy culture of the thirties, on the other hand, is all about movement, not the desperate simulation of movement we find in the road stories, but movement that suggests genuine freedom. That is why, with Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire, with George Balanchine and Martha Graham, choreography became as important as photography for this decade. The look of the great thirties musicals is everything that Dorothea Lange’s "Migrant Mother" or "Woman of the High Plains," both so angular and static, are not. It’s all circle and swirl, all movement and flow. Think of it: the rose-petal effect in Berkeley’s big numbers, the sweepingly elegant curvature of the Art Deco sets, the brilliance of movement of Astaire and Rogers, locked together in breathtaking dips and turns....Like all genuine couples, together they are something they could never have been separately, not simply romantic, not simply a vision of swank and elegance inherited from the nightclub era of the 1920s, but a dream of motion that appealed to people whose lives felt pinched, anxious, graceless, and static.

But the polarities and conflicts in Depression culture were not always so clearcut as the one between socially conscious realism and Hollywood-style escapism. For one thing, there was plenty of gray area between them. The gangster films that were so popular in the early part of the decade “were largely immigrant fables,” notes Dickstein, “as well as wild, almost parodic versions of Horatio Alger stories” that were “tellingly ambivalent about the American Dream.”

Dickstein considers scores of novels, poems, and works of literary reportage, as well as films, popular songs, and collaborative efforts between artists and writers working in different media. His pages on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—the lyrical and reflexive text that James Agee wrote to accompany Walker Evans’s stunning photographs of tenant farmers and their families—offer an admiring but unsentimental assessment of a deeply flawed masterpiece.

But the core of the book, in some ways, is Dickstein’s extensive consideration of Nathaniel West. While as active as any other left-leaning writer in the Popular Front causes of the day, West’s novels are darkly satirical in their handling of the tensions between populism and alienation, between solidarity and irony, between popular culture and modernist sensibility. He had “a genuine streak of proletarian sympathy in his makeup, a bleak affinity for human wretchedness that comes across clearly in his novels,” yet “avoided social realism and seemed to deal with spiritual rather than economic privation.” Dickstein comes back to West throughout Dancing in the Dark, finding in him the figure who splits the difference between Céline and the Marx Brothers.

After 1941, the economy got its groove back. Nothing primes the pump quite like war. But the previous dozen years left their mark on American politics and culture in the form of “a tension between individualism and community, between private initiative and public planning.” That tension has not diminished over the past seven decades. Dickstein’s account of the culture of the Great Depression at times proves uncannily familiar, and for good reason. “Artists and performers rarely succeed in changing the world,” he writes, “but they can change our feelings about the world, our understanding of it, the way we live in it.” And by paying attention to their work, we can come to understand the way we live now.

Click here to read an excerpt from Dancing in the Dark. Click here for a video--part one of seven--of Morris Dickstein discussing Dancing in the Dark.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: morris dickstein, dancing in the dark

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Scott McLemee discusses criticism finalist Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)

The past is not always prologue, but it sure gets your attention at times. Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression appeared just after the spectre of total global financial collapse had passed—though even with stimulus and bailout, and all the band-aids in the world, it’s clear that we are in for a long period of brutally reduced expectations.

There is, of course, a familiar condensed mental newsreel of the years following the 1929 crash. It tends to linger on a handful of images: soup kitchens, picket lines, dance marathons, Henry Fonda’s speech at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, families listening to FDR on the radio, and (this sequence proves most diverting) scantily clad chorus girls doing intricate numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Dickstein’s expansive and elegant reconstruction of the period doesn’t just expand the catalog of items that should define our memory of the period. He examines the style, the imagery, and the rhythms of Depression culture, paying close attention to how literature, music, and film captured—and, in a way, created—the texture of life in hard times.

Dickstein reminds us that the first few years of the Depression were marked by a pronounced tendency by “responsible” members of government and mass media to downplay just how bad things were getting. (I do not mention this to make any contemporary point; perish the thought.) Documentary realism was not simply the natural way to record what was happening to the country. It was a way artists and writers could cut through the fantasies of normalcy and confront the actual state of the American Dream. At the same time, the manufacturers and vendors of that dream still had a market:

Migrant workers were grasping at survival, not reaching for freedom. This is one reason why photography became such a central mode of expression in the 1930s. The migrant pictures, with their sharp angles, their clashing lines, are all about going nowhere; the people are pinned like social specimens, frozen into postures that allow little movement, no escape.

The fantasy culture of the thirties, on the other hand, is all about movement, not the desperate simulation of movement we find in the road stories, but movement that suggests genuine freedom. That is why, with Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire, with George Balanchine and Martha Graham, choreography became as important as photography for this decade. The look of the great thirties musicals is everything that Dorothea Lange’s "Migrant Mother" or "Woman of the High Plains," both so angular and static, are not. It’s all circle and swirl, all movement and flow. Think of it: the rose-petal effect in Berkeley’s big numbers, the sweepingly elegant curvature of the Art Deco sets, the brilliance of movement of Astaire and Rogers, locked together in breathtaking dips and turns....Like all genuine couples, together they are something they could never have been separately, not simply romantic, not simply a vision of swank and elegance inherited from the nightclub era of the 1920s, but a dream of motion that appealed to people whose lives felt pinched, anxious, graceless, and static.

But the polarities and conflicts in Depression culture were not always so clearcut as the one between socially conscious realism and Hollywood-style escapism. For one thing, there was plenty of gray area between them. The gangster films that were so popular in the early part of the decade “were largely immigrant fables,” notes Dickstein, “as well as wild, almost parodic versions of Horatio Alger stories” that were “tellingly ambivalent about the American Dream.”

Dickstein considers scores of novels, poems, and works of literary reportage, as well as films, popular songs, and collaborative efforts between artists and writers working in different media. His pages on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—the lyrical and reflexive text that James Agee wrote to accompany Walker Evans’s stunning photographs of tenant farmers and their families—offer an admiring but unsentimental assessment of a deeply flawed masterpiece.

But the core of the book, in some ways, is Dickstein’s extensive consideration of Nathaniel West. While as active as any other left-leaning writer in the Popular Front causes of the day, West’s novels are darkly satirical in their handling of the tensions between populism and alienation, between solidarity and irony, between popular culture and modernist sensibility. He had “a genuine streak of proletarian sympathy in his makeup, a bleak affinity for human wretchedness that comes across clearly in his novels,” yet “avoided social realism and seemed to deal with spiritual rather than economic privation.” Dickstein comes back to West throughout Dancing in the Dark, finding in him the figure who splits the difference between Céline and the Marx Brothers.

After 1941, the economy got its groove back. Nothing primes the pump quite like war. But the previous dozen years left their mark on American politics and culture in the form of “a tension between individualism and community, between private initiative and public planning.” That tension has not diminished over the past seven decades. Dickstein’s account of the culture of the Great Depression at times proves uncannily familiar, and for good reason. “Artists and performers rarely succeed in changing the world,” he writes, “but they can change our feelings about the world, our understanding of it, the way we live in it.” And by paying attention to their work, we can come to understand the way we live now.

Click here to read an excerpt from Dancing in the Dark. Click here for a video--part one of seven--of Morris Dickstein discussing Dancing in the Dark.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: morris dickstein, dancing in the dark

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Elizabeth Taylor discusses biography finalist Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin)

History is an act of creation and in Clarence King, Martha Sandweiss found an invented life, a man who had created a separate identity, one only revealed to his wife on his deathbed. In Passing Strange Martha Sandweiss re-creates these alternative universes, evoking a world in which boundaries are porous and reality were was stranger than fiction.

Known as a great adventurer, an explorer who mapped the American West, sandy-haired, blue-eyed King moved easily in the social elite of Newport and New York but he lived a double-life, that of James Todd, African-American Pullman porter. In this capacity, he married Ada Copeland, likely a former slave. They lived together for thirteen years and brought five children into the world, and Ada Copeland did not learn of her husband’s double life until he disclosed it on his deathbed.

In hands other than those of Sandweiss, this story could be a quirky, prurient tale. In placing it in the context of the Gilded Age, she evokes the time and explores how the segregated city allowed King to engage in this double life. Sandweiss creates portraits of King traveling across the bridge from Brooklyn and Queens and transforming himself in ways that allowed him to travel the fault lines of race and class. An erudite, convivial King, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, solves geological detective cases out west and then cavorts with high society but then just as easily morphs into a plainspoken working man, clad in Pullman attire and serving the white train passengers, mimicking a dialect so effectively that he was never exposed.

So, how could a white man pass as black? Why would a man move away from legal and social privilege? These questions are at the heart of Sandweiss’s book but are not limited by them. Instead, in King, Sandweiss found a story about a character who creates his own story at a time when the city was both segregated and fluid. King’s story, of course, is refracted through that of his wife, Ada Copeland Todd, and Sandweiss deftly depicts her, despite the paucity of evidence, fully realizing that without King—or Todd—Ada Copeland would have been entirely invisible. In the end, though, Ada Copeland was left penniless, forced to wage a legal battle to her husband’s estate.

Martha Sandweiss situates this story, which would have been the stuff of tabloids and twitter today, during the time of westward expansion, urbanization, racial politics, and an economic downturn. In so doing she tells the story not only of a couple but of the times. Sandweiss rescued this story from traditional accounts of King, the brilliant explorer, friend of presidents, because she was able to understand King when he wrote to Secretary of State John Hay: “Respectability lets the human pendulum swing over such a pitiful little arc.”

Click here to read an excerpt from Passing Strange.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: martha sandweiss, passing strange

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Elizabeth Taylor discusses biography finalist Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin)

History is an act of creation and in Clarence King, Martha Sandweiss found an invented life, a man who had created a separate identity, one only revealed to his wife on his deathbed. In Passing Strange Martha Sandweiss re-creates these alternative universes, evoking a world in which boundaries are porous and reality were was stranger than fiction.

Known as a great adventurer, an explorer who mapped the American West, sandy-haired, blue-eyed King moved easily in the social elite of Newport and New York but he lived a double-life, that of James Todd, African-American Pullman porter. In this capacity, he married Ada Copeland, likely a former slave. They lived together for thirteen years and brought five children into the world, and Ada Copeland did not learn of her husband’s double life until he disclosed it on his deathbed.

In hands other than those of Sandweiss, this story could be a quirky, prurient tale. In placing it in the context of the Gilded Age, she evokes the time and explores how the segregated city allowed King to engage in this double life. Sandweiss creates portraits of King traveling across the bridge from Brooklyn and Queens and transforming himself in ways that allowed him to travel the fault lines of race and class. An erudite, convivial King, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, solves geological detective cases out west and then cavorts with high society but then just as easily morphs into a plainspoken working man, clad in Pullman attire and serving the white train passengers, mimicking a dialect so effectively that he was never exposed.

So, how could a white man pass as black? Why would a man move away from legal and social privilege? These questions are at the heart of Sandweiss’s book but are not limited by them. Instead, in King, Sandweiss found a story about a character who creates his own story at a time when the city was both segregated and fluid. King’s story, of course, is refracted through that of his wife, Ada Copeland Todd, and Sandweiss deftly depicts her, despite the paucity of evidence, fully realizing that without King—or Todd—Ada Copeland would have been entirely invisible. In the end, though, Ada Copeland was left penniless, forced to wage a legal battle to her husband’s estate.

Martha Sandweiss situates this story, which would have been the stuff of tabloids and twitter today, during the time of westward expansion, urbanization, racial politics, and an economic downturn. In so doing she tells the story not only of a couple but of the times. Sandweiss rescued this story from traditional accounts of King, the brilliant explorer, friend of presidents, because she was able to understand King when he wrote to Secretary of State John Hay: “Respectability lets the human pendulum swing over such a pitiful little arc.”

Click here to read an excerpt from Passing Strange.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

Keyword tags: martha sandweiss, passing strange

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 NBCC Awards Finalists Reading 6:00 p.m. The New School University 's Tishman Auditorium, 66 W. 12th St., New York   Come hear NBCC finalists including Rae Armantrout (Versed), Blake Bailey (Cheever: A Life), Eula Biss (Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays), Stephen Burt (Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry), Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage), Wendy Doniger (The Hindus: An Alternative History), Brad Gooch (Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor), Debra Gwartney (Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love), David Hajdu (Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture), Michelle Huneven (Blame), Marlon James (The Book of Night Women), Mary Karr (Lit),Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains), Kati Marton (Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America), Greg Milner (Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music), Benjamin Moser (Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector), Jayne Anne Phillips (Lark and Termite), Stanislao G. Pugliese (Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone), D.A. Powell (Chronic), Martha A. Sandweiss (Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line), and Rachel Zucker (Museum of Accidents).   Thursday, March 11, 2010
NBCC Awards Ceremony
6:00 p.m.
The New School University's Tishman Auditorious, 66 W. 12th Street, New York

We'll kick off the evening with Scott McLemee, Balakian chair and former Balakian winner, presenting this year's Balakian to Joan Acocella of The New Yorker. Geeta Sharma Jensen, Sandrof chair, will present this year's Sandrof award for lifetime achievement to author, critic, small press publisher, and professor Joyce Carol Oates, with introductory remarks by Edmund White. Followed by the announcement of the NBCC awards in autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (reviews of all the finalists can be seen here).

Join us following the awards ceremony for a reception at The Lang Center, 55 West 13th Street. Buy tickets ($45) here or here or at the door.
      Keyword tags: joyce carol oates, jayne anne phillips, jayne anne phillips , joan acocella, blake bailey, marlon james, national book critics circle awards, stephen burt, brad gooch, benjamin moser, tracy kidder, rachel zucker, d.a. powell, kati marton, mary karr, david hajdu, martha sandweiss, debra gwartney, eula biss, michelle huneven, stanislao g. pugliese , rae armantrout, the new yorker

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 NBCC Awards Finalists Reading 6:00 p.m. The New School University 's Tishman Auditorium, 66 W. 12th St., New York   Come hear NBCC finalists including Rae Armantrout (Versed), Blake Bailey (Cheever: A Life), Eula Biss (Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays), Stephen Burt (Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry), Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage), Wendy Doniger (The Hindus: An Alternative History), Brad Gooch (Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor), Debra Gwartney (Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love), David Hajdu (Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture), Michelle Huneven (Blame), Marlon James (The Book of Night Women), Mary Karr (Lit),Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains), Kati Marton (Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America), Greg Milner (Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music), Benjamin Moser (Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector), Jayne Anne Phillips (Lark and Termite), Stanislao G. Pugliese (Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone), D.A. Powell (Chronic), Martha A. Sandweiss (Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line), and Rachel Zucker (Museum of Accidents).   Thursday, March 11, 2010
NBCC Awards Ceremony
6:00 p.m.
The New School University's Tishman Auditorious, 66 W. 12th Street, New York

We'll kick off the evening with Scott McLemee, Balakian chair and former Balakian winner, presenting this year's Balakian to Joan Acocella of The New Yorker. Geeta Sharma Jensen, Sandrof chair, will present this year's Sandrof award for lifetime achievement to author, critic, small press publisher, and professor Joyce Carol Oates, with introductory remarks by Edmund White. Followed by the announcement of the NBCC awards in autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (reviews of all the finalists can be seen here).

Join us following the awards ceremony for a reception at The Lang Center, 55 West 13th Street. Buy tickets ($45) here or here or at the door.
      Keyword tags: joyce carol oates, jayne anne phillips, jayne anne phillips , joan acocella, blake bailey, marlon james, national book critics circle awards, stephen burt, brad gooch, benjamin moser, tracy kidder, rachel zucker, d.a. powell, kati marton, mary karr, david hajdu, martha sandweiss, debra gwartney, eula biss, michelle huneven, stanislao g. pugliese , rae armantrout, the new yorker

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Barbara Hoffert discusses fiction finalist Marlon James's The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)

“Every Negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.”

This phrase comes up repeatedly in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women, a gaspingly harrowing and yet unquenchable read that will take you right down to one of the lower circles in hell. If you think you know what slavery in the 18th-century Americas was like, think again; then read this book and you’ll get actually to live it.

The heroine is Lillith, a slave with vivid green eyes born on a Jamaica sugar plantation to a 13-year-old who had been assaulted by the overseer and who perishes in childbirth. As a youngster, Lillith herself kills a black overseer, or Johnny-jump, who tries to rape her, fights her way upward in a household managed by a fierce slave woman named Homer, is assaulted and whipped repeatedly for the slightest infraction, but finally finds a strange sort of love and remains spirited throughout. For though she’s scarily powerful enough to be invited to join the Night Women, who are planning a revolt, she is never completely one of them but remains a complex character of her own. Throughout, the language is sensuous and biting, delivered in the island’s own cadences; it takes you over, lulls you, then moves in for the kill. With such immediacy, James’s work brings you into a horrifying world. It takes you, and makes of you what it will.

Click here for a video of Marlon James discussing The Book of Night Women.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

 

Keyword tags: marlon james, the book of night women

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Barbara Hoffert discusses fiction finalist Marlon James's The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)

“Every Negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.”

This phrase comes up repeatedly in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women, a gaspingly harrowing and yet unquenchable read that will take you right down to one of the lower circles in hell. If you think you know what slavery in the 18th-century Americas was like, think again; then read this book and you’ll get actually to live it.

The heroine is Lillith, a slave with vivid green eyes born on a Jamaica sugar plantation to a 13-year-old who had been assaulted by the overseer and who perishes in childbirth. As a youngster, Lillith herself kills a black overseer, or Johnny-jump, who tries to rape her, fights her way upward in a household managed by a fierce slave woman named Homer, is assaulted and whipped repeatedly for the slightest infraction, but finally finds a strange sort of love and remains spirited throughout. For though she’s scarily powerful enough to be invited to join the Night Women, who are planning a revolt, she is never completely one of them but remains a complex character of her own. Throughout, the language is sensuous and biting, delivered in the island’s own cadences; it takes you over, lulls you, then moves in for the kill. With such immediacy, James’s work brings you into a horrifying world. It takes you, and makes of you what it will.

Click here for a video of Marlon James discussing The Book of Night Women.

The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.

 

Keyword tags: marlon james, the book of night women