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“A Crucifixion Event”

“I wasn’t making a damn thing,” according to James Robinson. Robinson was remembering the year (1968) and remembering his 15 years working for the Memphis Department of Public Works. He was earning $1.65 an hour. He was a member of the almost entirely black labor force in Memphis known as “garbage men.”

As such, Robinson was an unclassified day laborer. He could be fired, by his (white) supervisor, on a moment’s notice. He had no regular breaks. He had no place to go to the bathroom or wash up. And he had 15 minutes for lunch. If it rained, he lost wages. If the day ran into night, he didn’t make overtime.

It was a low-paying job, and in 1968, it was a very dirty job. Memphians didn’t leave their trash in specially designed, wheeled containers on the curb. Sanitation workers had to carry garbage, often in unlidded, 50-gallon drums, off a property and lift it onto a waiting truck. And the garbage didn’t stop there. Workers had to clean an entire property, and that included fallen tree limbs, loose paper, grass clippings, and sometimes dead animals.

On February 1, 1968, one of those garbage trucks also carried two dead sanitation workers: Echol Cole and Robert Walker. They’d climbed into the barrel of the truck to escape a heavy downpour, but a possible mechanical failure sent the truck’s hydraulic ram into action. The two men were crushed, and on February 12th, nearly 1,300 black laborers in the Memphis Department of Public Works, without notice, went on strike. What they wanted was a union, but, as Michael K. Honey writes in his exhaustive, absorbing, definitive history, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, “[l]ittle did they imagine that their decision would challenge generations of white supremacy in Memphis and have staggering consequences for the nation.”

Honey, professor of African-American and labor studies at the University of Washington-Tacoma, has spent 10 years researching this story after penning two studies in the 1990s that focused on black workers, unionism, and civil rights in the 20th-century South. He lived in Memphis for six years as a worker for the civil rights movement, beginning in 1970. And he’s researched the city’s modern history as well as anybody: its polarizing racial attitudes, its unyielding government officials, its law enforcers, its activists, its labor organizers, its religious leaders, and the national leader who was shot dead here on April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. “A crucifixion event” is how Rev. James Lawson, a leading civil rights figure in Memphis in the ’60s, described King’s assassination, 39 years ago. King — his career at a crossroads — was himself 39.

“It’s almost a universal,” Honey said recently by phone from Tacoma. “Most people know that King was killed in Memphis, but almost nobody knows what the sanitation workers’ strike was about or that there was even a strike. People don’t know that King died in the middle of a struggle for the right to belong to a union.

“I see my book as presenting a somewhat different King — someone rooted in the labor movement as much as the civil rights movement. King had a profound appreciation of the issues relating to black workers. From the Montgomery bus boycott on, he was circulating among union people from all over the country.”

One of the many virtues of Going Down Jericho Road is its demonstration of King’s expanding concerns by the mid-’60s: economic injustice in America (and his troubled Poor People’s Campaign); workers’ rights (across all racial lines); the rising Black Power movement (in the face of King’s unwavering commitment to nonviolence); and opposition to the Vietnam war (in the face of opposition from both blacks and whites).

But what of Memphis and of King in 2007?

“The legacy of the ’68 movement has been very much incorporated into the city’s story,” Honey conceded, and he pointed to the strides the city has made in race relations. But it troubles him to return to Memphis. (And he returns often to visit good friends.) He referred to closed factories, the disappearance of union jobs, the poverty he still sees in Midtown, in South Memphis, and in his old neighborhood from the ’70s, North Memphis.

“This was the problem King was trying to address, and it’s still being ignored. And not only in Memphis. We have a U.S. president who’s willing to let the issue of poverty go. We saw that in New Orleans.

“But on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I took note that people began talking about King’s speech against the Vietnam war — the one he made on April 4, 1967. In that speech, King explained why the U.S. keeps getting involved in these conflicts … how the U.S. has its priorities upside down: spending money on militarism when it should be spending money on solving the social problems that give rise to violence. I thought, back in 2003, that people are now turning to King to understand the mess we’re in.

“Conventional minds, however, want to typecast King as only a civil rights leader. It allows them to not talk about his broader spiritual framework and the larger issues he spoke about. I think people are beginning to move into a real understanding of King — King the moral leader. This is not about black and white only. It’s about human rights and economic justice, war and peace.”

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Revelations

A widower in Memphis, his children grown, receives what he terms “a gift”: news that he has pancreatic cancer (and an added gift: a renewed, profound recognition of his late wife’s love).

Another man: a psychologist, in midlife, in the car with his wife and teenage daughter, on their way from Bolivar to Memphis, recalls the ghost of the boy he once was and the girl who helped him see beyond his “fearful self-consciousness” (the same girl he loved, at 13, and lost).

And a woman, also in midlife: down from Memphis to attend a wedding in Mississippi, meets again a man and recalls that for a few months, 21 years ago, the couple had been “something.” “Untranslatable and ecstatic then,” she thinks, “now it was merely untranslatable.”

Highlights, then — revelations, really — from midlife and drawn from the first three stories in the short-story collection It’s Not the Heat (iUniverse) by Hadley Hury, a Memphian, a former film critic for this newspaper, and today the chair of the department of English at Hutchison.

Is there a shared theme throughout these and the seven additional stories in the collection? Not according to the author.

“The questions each story raises, as well as the sense of discovery, for me, changes with each of them,” Hury says. “I didn’t envision or intend one overarching theme. That said, I can perceive one possible correlative running through at least most of them. How to state it? I can think of two borrowings. One from Emily Dickinson: ‘That Love is all there is,/is all we know of Love.’ And one from Iris Murdoch: ‘Hope calmly and believe in love.'”

But add to Dickinson and Murdoch some words from Eudora Welty (and make them the epigraph that opens It’s Not the Heat): “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order: the continuous thread of revelation.”

Revelation then, and again, and in Hury’s work, you’re likely to find it in the unlikeliest places:

A couple, their two children grown, worry over then welcome the arrival of their son’s partner (for life?), another man (“All We Know of Love”). Or a couple, late in life, grow concerned with then rescue the neglected boy who lives down the street (“Along the Border”). Or an Episcopal priest, happily married but given to self-questioning, recalls a boyhood friend then finds himself adopting the voice of the King himself, Elvis (“Till It Hurts”). Revelatory and significant, then, according to the order of events, but for an author who’s already written one novel (The Edge of the Gulf ), does form follow function? Translation: How do the requirements of a novel compare to the requirements of the short story?

“Whole different ball game,” Hury believes. “The novel is a commitment of a different sort of focus, of exploration, of narrative resources. What I loved about the stories in It’s Not the Heat is that with each one a different partnership begins to develop as one works. At times, I guide the story — and that affords a pleasant, even if delusional, sense of mastery. And at times the story guides me.

“As with any partnership, the sense of power and play, of give and take, changes hands over and over again through the process. That makes it fun and exciting. And that’s where my sense of discovery emerges — as I hope it may, in differing ways, for readers.”

But if you’re looking for discovery along autobiographical lines — a line that readers (and reviewers) often seek and writers just as often seek to sidestep — look again. According to Hury:

“You can take the writer out of his autobiography, but you can never take every shred of the autobiography out of the writer. However, what may be there in this regard are all shards — no whole pieces — and they are almost always transformed in the fictive process.”

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Book Features Books

Total Recall

CREDIT: Tom Ackerman

At the age of 8, his father, a high school basketball coach in small-town Mississippi, died in a car accident, and at the age of 9, his mother, a homemaker with a taste for Broadway show tunes, died of cancer. That’s the worst of it, but it isn’t the last of it in Kevin Sessums’ memoir of growing up gay, Mississippi Sissy (St. Martin’s Press).

Consider the other facts of the matter: Sessums the little kid, glued to the TV game show What’s My Line? — and especially glued to its star panelist Arlene Francis. Or Sessums the bigger kid, begging to read Valley of the Dolls and reporting on it before his fellow sixth-graders. Or Sessums the teenager, watching as Eudora Welty downs a bourbon or three in the Jackson home of Sessums’ friend and mentor, the newspaper man Frank Hains. Or Sessums the Millsaps undergraduate, befriending — make that, dating — another Frank, this one the first African American to play football for Mississippi State: Frank Dowsing Jr. But also consider Sessums the eyewitness — the one who discovered the body of Hains, bound and bludgeoned to death in Hains’ own bed. The culprit, a drifter, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to Parchman Penitentiary. Sessums, for his part, got himself to New York City — the Juilliard School of Drama, to be exact.

But the stage wasn’t the thing. Journalism was. Sessums served as executive editor of Interview magazine, then as a celebrity profiler, for 14 years, for Vanity Fair. Today he’s a contributing editor at Allure. But the day the Flyer contacted him, Sessums the interviewer was Sessums the interviewee. Here’s what the unapologetic Mississippi sissy had to say:

Flyer: Your memoir’s out of your hands and in the hands of reviewers and readers. One, why did you write it? Two, what do you think of it?

Kevin Sessums: I have a lot of low-grade stress about this. My back’s gone out … you have no idea … the anticipation … now that it’s here and I realize what I’ve written. It’s like, Oh God, what have I put out in the world?

People in the past asked me to write a memoir, and I never wanted to. I thought of memoirs as a kind of hackneyed form. But someone finally convinced me to do it, and once I found a way into writing it, it was surprisingly easy … well, not easy but easier than I thought it would be.

During parts of it I found myself depressed, especially the parts about my mother’s illness — depressed in a very physical way. I didn’t know why. And then it dawned on me: What do you think you’re writing about? You’re pushing your own buttons here! Once I realized that, the depression lifted and I wrote on.

A month ago I sat down with the book for the first time in weeks. I got nauseous. It’s like the Cliffs Notes of my “shrinkdom.” I guess I realized why I’m a lonely old homo with a Chihuahua sitting in my lap.

Your memoir has its share of graphic sex scenes, including several scenes between you, age 13, and a middle-aged minister, who befriended and betrayed you. Are you concerned that those scenes are too graphic even for this day and age?

I figured if I’m going to write this kind of book, I’d have to be brutally honest. I hope it’s brutally honest but not vulgar. In fact, there’s only one real sex scene in it. The rest is molestation, which is not sex. But it’s a book about a lot of different things. It’s about otherness, survival, race. Growing up in Mississippi when I did, the book had to be about race.

More than the sex, I was worried, as a white man, about using the N-word. But I had to be honest about the times. If I heard the N-word once, growing up, I heard it a million times. I couldn’t gloss over that.

Your brother Kim and sister Karole … what’s been their reactions to Mississippi Sissy?

My brother read it quickly. He said this is your version of what happened. My sister … it took her months to read it, because she would start to cry. They don’t have the memories I did.

Even as a kid, I had that heightened awareness that all writers have. You’re born with it. You see life as a narrative. I “got” the connections. I was as much an audience to my life as I was a participant. It’s a curse and a blessing at the same time. Some people just feel like a spy in their own lives. It’s a hard thing to live with, and I still haven’t found a way to live with it successfully.

On the issue of molestation again: Do you wonder if perhaps you treated it too matter of factly?

I was traumatized! But is this book woe-is-me-I’m-a-victim? No. What molestation leaves you with — that you have to live with for the rest of your life — is not victimhood but complicity. That is the curse, because molesters are very talented at making their victims complicit. I even say it in the book: You’re afraid to tell, because you’re afraid to tell on yourself.

What people don’t talk about is that being molested, on some level, feels good. But it’s really about power. You never outlive it. You can’t get past it.

I read that you were disinvited to a bookstore signing in Tupelo.

The manager of that store saw me read in Orlando and wanted me to read at her store, but the store’s owner read the book and refused to have me be there. He said he was a friend of the late Frank Dowsing’s. He was very upset about what he thought was my betrayal of Frank. I think I’ve written a dignified, loving portrait.

But the bookstore owner was upset. And the only reason he could be upset is because Frank was a homosexual, and maybe this store owner can’t put the words “loving” and “dignified” in the same sentence as “homosexual.” There are people like that, and a lot of them in Mississippi, still.

I’m thinking of having a T-shirt made up that says “Banned in Tupelo” and wearing it to every reading I have in Mississippi. You’d think the birthplace of Elvis Presley would be a little more welcoming of outsiders. Elvis had the good sense to move to Memphis.

You’ve got a signing in Memphis on the 20th. You’ve been here before?

Twice. The first time was when I was in college. There’s a park … what is it … Overton Park. I was walking through Overton Park and got picked up by a football player for Memphis State. He took me back to his apartment, and we had sex below a portrait of Miss Tennessee. He’d been dating her. Next time I saw him, he was a bartender in a gay bar in New York.

The other time in Memphis was when I interviewed Dennis Quaid, who was filming Great Balls of Fire. I went out drinking with him. I tried to keep up. I’m not a drinker. But I was thinking, I’m not getting drunk, I’m sort of feeling high. The next morning I woke up with alcohol poisoning!

So those are my two memories of Memphis: sex with a Memphis State football player and alcohol poisoning.

Mississippi Sissy ends right before your move to New York. Any plans for a sequel?

I don’t know. If I wrote about my life since the age of 19, you’d probably find me at the bottom of the Hudson.

One last question: I read in the blog at your Web site, MississippiSissy.com, that you’re planning to drive yourself to your booksignings throughout Mississippi. You finally got your driver’s license?

Oh God. You … have pushed … a button … today.

My driving road test was scheduled for today, but the school had booked the test in Yonkers! So I’m driven from Manhattan up to Yonkers in the driving-school car. Then there’s this long line of cars waiting to take the road test. We wait for an hour and 10 minutes!

We finally get to the front of the line, and the woman who is going to give me my road test tells the driving-school guy: “You can’t take a road test in this car. There’s no inside handle on the driver’s side.” It had snapped off. I couldn’t take the road test! We had to come all the way back! So I just called my publisher, St. Martin’s. I said, “You know what? You’re hiring a cute Ole Miss person to drive me around to my booksignings in Mississippi. I have literally gone the extra mile so I could drive myself. I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t!

It’s like the universe is saying to me, “Don’t get behind the wheel of a car, or I will kill you.” Ugh. I’m going to listen to the universe.

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Grave Thoughts

In a glowing review in The New York Times of Jim Harrison’s ninth and newest novel, Returning to Earth, the reviewer, Will Blythe, itemizes what he calls “Jim Harrison’s Five Rules for Zestful Living,” based on Harrison’s celebrated body of work. Those rules are:

1) “Eat well … avoiding the ninny diets and mincing cuisines that demonize appetite and make unthinkable a tasty snack of hog jowls.”

2) “Pursue love and sex. … Doing it outdoors on stumps, in clearings and even swarmed by mosquitoes is particularly recommended.”

3) “Welcome animals, especially bears, ravens and wolves, into your waking and dream life.”

4) “Rather than lighting out for territory, we ought to try living in it.”

5) “[L]ove the detour. Take the longest route between two points, since the journey is the thing, a notion to which … we all pay lip service but few of us indulge.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m good for four out of five. Yes, I’ve eaten hog jowl. Yes, I’ve welcomed animals into my life — dogs, though, not bears, ravens, and wolves. And yes, whatever the “territory,” I guess I’ve tried living in it. But no, I’ve never had sex on a stump. But yes, I’ve indulged in a detour. I have taken the longest route between two points: the seemingly unending distance between page 1 and page 280 of Returning to Earth. Where did the journey, which is the “thing,” get me? To wondering.

In Part I of the book, we follow the dictation of Donald, who is 45 and in a sick bed dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He’s part-Chippewa, used to work in construction, and lives in Marquette, Michigan — way up in the Upper Peninsula. His wife Cynthia, 44, is the one taking down Donald’s words, and during the course of that dictation we learn that Donald and Cynthia are the parents of a son named Herald (a grad student in mathematics at Caltech) and a daughter named Clare, who also lives in California and wants to work for wardrobe in the movie business. Clare is carrying off and on (has been since the two were teenagers) with K, who attends the University of Michigan. That’s “K” for Kenneth, the son of Polly, who used to be married to David, who is Cynthia’s brother, which makes Clare and K step-cousins — step-cousins, not cousins, because K’s biological father was a Vietnam vet who used to be married to Polly, but he died in a motorcycle accident. As for David, he’s in love with Vera, who lives in Mexico, the country she fled to, pregnant, after David’s alcoholic father, David Sr., raped her when the girl was 12. (Jesse, Vera’s Mexican father, used to work for David Sr. Donald, besides doing construction, worked as David Sr.’s handyman, which is how Donald and Cynthia met.) All this then: background to dying Donald and his Native-American visions of bears and ravens and wolves.

Part II of Returning to Earth is K’s side of things, and in this section’s closing pages, Herald injects Donald with a lethal dose of phenobarbital mixed with Dilantin, after which Donald is lowered into a grave, Cynthia and Clare at his side, and Donald dies. It’s the way he wanted to go. Here’s how the rest of Returning to Earth goes:

Part III is David’s view of things four months after the death of his brother-in-law. Part IV is Cynthia’s view of things five months after the death of her husband.

What do we learn? I’m still wondering. Seems everybody’s trying to fill the vacuum created by Donald’s noble dying — except for Clare, who goes from wanting to become a wardrobe mistress to wanting to become a bear, and Flower, Donald’s father’s Chippewa cousin, is just the woman to teach her metaphysically how. Crazy? It beats the mind-numbingly aimless narrative of interlocking lives we’re treated to for a couple hundred pages.

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Home Front

Snapshots, nothing more. … They wouldn’t add up, wouldn’t form a narrative, because the narrative … would lie elsewhere. … [T]he piece would be about the comic intricacies of the chase, and its ultimate futility.”

Those are the words of Lucy Bengstrom, a free-lance journalist hired to write a magazine profile of an elusive author, but the words might as well describe the strategy of Lucy’s creator, Jonathan Raban, in his new novel, Surveillance, which does indeed trade in “snapshots,” “comic intricacies,” and “ultimate futility.”

Is it, though, the post-9/11 novel that British reviewers have already dubbed “required reading”? Not by a long shot, and here I am, an admirer of Raban’s essay work and especially his understanding of contemporary world events inside the pages of The New York Review of Books. What’s the problem, then, with Surveillance? Precisely those snapshots, comic intricacies, and ultimate futility.

For “snapshots,” start with Lucy. She’s in her late 40s and the mother of 11-year-old Alida. Alida’s father, a high-powered East Coast lawyer, was a one-night stand, and his name was Edward Something — “something” because Lucy doesn’t know. She never asked. And he’s not in the pages of Surveillance. Chalk it up to a narrative that lies “elsewhere.” As is the full story behind Lucy’s murdered father, who was an agent for the Bureau of Land Management in Montana. As is the full story behind his murderer, a guy with a bone to pick with the feds. As is the full story behind Lucy’s difficult mother, who once accused her daughter of having the personality of a piece of blotting paper.

Blotting paper? So be it — the better for Lucy to soak up the subjects of her magazine profiles and the better for Lucy to get to the bottom of her latest focus, August Vanags, a right-wing history professor who’s penned a memoir of his boyhood spent witnessing Nazi atrocities in Central Europe. The memoir’s a best-seller, but is the book (and its author), in fact, a fraud? Lucy’s beginning to wonder, but she’s feeling less like a reporter and more like a “spook.”

Spooking, spying, suspicion … the theme runs throughout Surveillance. The setting is Seattle not far in the future, national IDs have been issued, the Department of Homeland Security regularly runs response exercises to staged terrorist attacks, and the star of the fake show is often Tad Zachary, a gay, HIV-positive but healthy (or is his doctor lying to him?) actor who happens also to be Lucy’s neighbor/best bud and Alida’s substitute dad. But Tad is on a tear as a late-night trawler of foreign Internet news sites. He’s just waiting, no, eager to see the U.S. president and his administration “blown to atomic dust or drowned in a sack.” The crime? The president’s making a mess of the Mideast (not to mention his playing loose with the Constitution and the environment), which makes him, in Tad’s view, a true terrorist.

And then there’s Charles Ong Lee, who isn’t a terrorist, but he’s up to his own shadiness. He’s the owner of the apartment building where Lucy, Alida, and Tad live, and he’s ready to make a killing by demolishing the building and replacing it with a real cash cow: a garage, to add to the chain of parking lots he already owns. What’s he doing in this novel? Faking his identity (again according to Tad), spying on his thieving employees, and putting the make on Lucy, who laughs in his face (a “comic intricacy”?). Why Lucy also spends most of Surveillance ready to reach for the nearest wine glass Raban never explains.

Just as you’ll have to take Raban’s word for it when disaster strikes in the closing scene of Surveillance. Some reviewers are calling the ending a real shocker. I’m calling it a cop-out. Or is the author playing with “ultimate futility”? Better for you to turn to nonfiction: Jonathan Raban’s essays on post-9/11 America, My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front. There the snapshots add up to a narrative, and the narrative isn’t elsewhere: It’s on the page, drawn from the headlines, darker than fiction.

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Music Music Features

Summer of 69

True music lovers understand the value of Smokey Robinson’s sound maternal advice: You better shop around. Pop crushes can be as easy and regrettable as a drunken one-night-stand, because even the homeliest melodies can be made over by major-label cosmetologists, dressed for quick sale in trendy studio fashions, and shipped out to walk the slinky, unavoidable streets of Top 40 radio.

Pop is easy and available, but time passes, tastes change, and a decade down the road your beloved prom theme — once a constant aural companion — loses its hormonal urgency, youthful blush, and deep personal meaning until all that’s left is an embarrassing “Oops! … I Did It Again.”

Nobody seems to understand this better than the Magnetic Fields’ wryly misanthropic Stephin Merritt, whose 1999 triple-disc release 69 Love Songs was a triumph of quixotic craftsmanship over the assembly-line style of hit-making that prompted Frank Zappa to ask the musical question, “Is that a real pancho or a Sears pancho?”

Containing nearly three hours of material drawing inspiration from every page of the great American songbook (pre- and post-rock), 69 Love Songs was bigger and far more ambitious than the average boxed retrospective of an established, best-selling artist. It was destined to become either an instant classic or a cautionary tale for megalomaniacal indie rockers everywhere. Fortunately for Merritt (and for the rest of us), it was embraced by critics far and wide, earning a top slot on countless year-end lists and astounding brand penetration for an ad hoc band that never, ever tours.

“Well, we haven’t gone gold,” says L.D. Beghtol, the former Memphis Flyer writer who collaborated with Merritt on 69 Love Songs and the author of 69 Love Songs: A Field Guide, the latest installment in Continuum Press’ wonderful 33 1/3 book series.

“Maybe if you counted every individual disc in the three-CD set it would be gold,” Beghtol adds, reconsidering the industry standard as slyly as Merritt has reconsidered the industry.

Books in the 33 1/3 series focus on single, highly influential rock-era recordings ranging from Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder, and beyond. Each book presents its subject matter from a semi-insider’s perspective, eschewing academic treatments and all the banal tropes of traditional rock journalism.

“Music writers write about themselves,” Beghtol says, staving off a yawn. “How many times have you read a review that started out, ‘When I was 17, I was really, really sad, and this album I’m about to write about saved my life.’ It’s boring, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

L.D. Beghtol

According to Beghtol, who played a number of unusual instruments and whose rich, raspy baritone voice can be heard throughout 69 Love Songs, Merritt is a pop artist more in the mold of Andy Warhol than Justin Timberlake. His images are coolly appropriated from a distance, as are his sonics, which are borrowed in equal measure from the Mod sounds of “Summer Nights”-era Marianne Faithfull, the darker side of ’80s new wave, Hank Williams-era honky-tonk, and the pre-rock stylings of Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael. In Merritt’s songs, “keeping it real” is rejected in favor of “keeping it interesting,” and romance is only approached in purely literary terms.

“In the late-’60s/early-’70s context of ‘man with an acoustic guitar,’ commercial sincerity is taken literally,” Beghtol explains. “Stephin’s is a more distanced reality. It’s more like saying, here’s a bunch of emotions. If you like them and want to believe in them for three minutes, you can. Because if artifice is good enough and complete enough, then it’s real.”

Just as Merritt rejects any traditional sense of realism within the framework of his songs, Beghtol has abandoned traditional narrative and presented his take on 69 Love Songs (the music) in the form of a devil’s dictionary.

Although there’s plenty of interview material for fans, including wry commentary from various band members about the recording of each individual song, the author has devoted the majority of his pages to a funny, endlessly fulfilling exploration of the famously literate songwriter’s most effective tool: language.

“There was no point in writing for the casual reader,” Beghtol says. “A casual reader’s just not going to pick up one of these books. It’s not going to happen. It’s for fans. These are smart kids, so I wanted to give them something that would be worth their $10. And I wasn’t going to write another piece about the genius of Stephin Merritt.”

In addition to penning 69 Love Songs: A Field Guide, Beghtol, a multi-award-winning graphic artist, also designed the book’s layout, filling its clean, easy-to-read pages with quirky illustrations and subtle visual puns.

“One of the conditions of my doing the book was that I got to design it. I knew it would be fun and that I would have the ability to access images in a way that [the publisher] just wouldn’t have either the time or the energy.

“I’m an enthusiast,” Beghtol says of his approach to music writing. “I’m a cheerleader for justice. So many music writers want to tell you all the reasons why something is bad just to show off how smart they are. What I like to do is say, Hey, here’s all this really neat stuff that you should know about.”

In addition to his work as a freelance writer, designer for Village Voice Media, and sometime member of the Magnetic Fields, Beghtol has been associated with at least three other literate art-rock bands: Moth Wranglers, Flare, and L.D. and the New Criticism, whose newest EP, Axyareal, is due out in March.

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We Recommend We Recommend

A Fine Romance?

When native Memphian Joan Williams died in 2004, she left behind five novels (one a National Book Award finalist) and one short-story collection — work that, with the exception of two early stories, she produced after 1953. The year is significant, because it’s the year Williams ended her romantic involvement with William Faulkner, a man who, when the two met in Oxford in 1949, was 31 years Williams’ senior and married. The exact nature of that relationship is explored in William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers (McFarland & Co.) by Lisa C. Hickman.

The book is in many ways a ground-breaker: It draws on unpublished letters between Williams and Faulkner; it draws on information supplied by the psychiatrists who treated Faulkner at Memphis’ Gartly-Ramsay Hospital; and it draws on the willingness of Williams to talk openly of these years — years that she feared overshadowed her subsequent writing career.

As Hickman writes in the Preface, “Joan often, and rightly, felt she struggled more for recognition because of her relationship with Faulkner, that her talent somehow was dismissed because of their association.”

Hickman, who teaches writing and literature at Christian Brothers University, is on the record too. In an interview in the January issue of Memphis magazine, she explains: “It’s tiring to point out over and over Joan’s literary legacy and then have someone reduce it to ‘Didn’t she have an affair with William Faulkner?’ It’s that sexism that I find extremely trying. … It is past time for Joan Williams to assume her rightful place in the distinguished roster of Southern women writers.”

Booksigning and reading by Lisa C. Hickman at Square Books, Oxford, Thursday, January 25th, 5 p.m. (662-236-2262)

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Book Features Books

Rescue Effort

“[T]he ignorance of this lordly and insolent oligarchy is equaled only by its ineffable baseness.”

So said Horace Maynard, a legislator from East Tennessee as the Civil War entered its final year. Maynard was referring to the “fire-eaters,” a group of Southern businessmen and power brokers who had argued during the 1850s for secession in a growing ideological (and financial) battle against the North.

Here is one way the fire-eaters won that battle but lost the war:

In 1858, a richly outfitted racing yacht on the registry of the New York Yacht Club, a vessel called the Wanderer, served as the last ship to transport Africans to America as slaves — despite the fact that such capture and shipment of slaves to the U.S. had been outlawed in 1818. The voyage of the Wanderer and the subsequent trial in Savannah of the ship’s crew (and by association, its backers) galvanized the country, just as the voyage was designed to do by the fire-eaters, with states’-rights proponents in the South pitted against abolitionist forces in the North. Secession, which had not had a solid footing in the South, quickly gained that footing.

The full and fascinating story is told in The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set Its Sails (St. Martin’s Press) by Erik Calonius, former London-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, former Miami bureau chief for Newsweek, and, at the beginning of his journalism career in the late 1970s, former managing editor of Memphis magazine, the Flyer‘s sister publication.

If the story of the Wanderer is news to you, it was news to Calonius as well. As he writes in his author’s note, Calonius was visiting the museum on Jekyll Island, Georgia (where the Wanderer made land after its trip across the Atlantic and up the Congo) when he saw the ship reproduced in a painting. The museum caption read:

“In 1858 … the Wanderer delivered a cargo of African slaves to the coast of Jekyll. This action caused a scandal, and charges were brought against many people, including the ship’s crew and its owner, Charles Lamar of Savannah. All of the defendants were found innocent, or charges against them were dropped.” End of caption. But no end to Calonius’ curiosity.

“There was an advantage in not being an expert on the Civil War,” Calonius said in a recent interview from his home in Orlando. “It meant I was open to anything — the accounts of slave captains, for instance, or even in 1858, the idea that New York City was a center of the African slave trade.

“I grew up on Long Island, and while everything boils down to a cliche, up North you learn that the North was against slavery and the South was for it. One side was good; one side was bad. But once you realize how involved the North was, not only in the slave trade but also skimming money off the work of slaves, you realize nobody was innocent.

“I also learned that there was a tremendous amount of reluctance on the part of the South to support secession. But there was a radical movement … a laughable lot. No one had respect for [the fire-eaters] 10 years before the war, and yet, somehow they took hold of the agenda. Through intimidation and use of the press as a bully pulpit, they were able to pull it off.”

The lesson taught, according to Calonius: “A group of extremists can take over and overwhelm the will of an unfocused and weak majority.” You’re welcome to draw your own contemporary conclusions.

No question, though, that Calonius has brought this underreported, at times shocking story to vivid life, and for that you have his reporting skills to thank and the freedom granted to him by his publisher.

“I had a good journalism background, but I had to overcome it,” Calonius admitted. “Working for The Wall Street Journal, I had to be extremely accurate. They pound accuracy into you. In the first draft of The Wanderer, I could have gone before the Supreme Court and argued every fact. When I turned the book in to the publisher, however, they liked it but thought it was too dry. They gave me license to use the creative side of my brain, to bring the scenes to life. But I still stayed true to the facts.”

Not the least of those facts: the horrendous conditions suffered by the slaves on a hidden second deck of the Wanderer during its transatlantic trip — conditions that allowed the ship’s 487 men, women, and children a space 12 inches in width, 18 inches in height, and less than five feet in length per person. This on a ship that, before its arrival on the west coast of Africa, featured Belgian carpets, linen tablecloths, and a library of leather-bound books. Eighty of those Africans were to die before the ship reached the U.S.

Among the Africans who survived was a man who took the name Ward Lee. His descendants eventually traveled north — to Brooklyn, then to Long Island. By the 1980s, Lee’s descendants included teachers and lawyers, and his great-great-granddaughters became widely recognized. You knew them on billboards as the Doublemint Gum Twins.

And what of the fire-eaters? As Calonius observed, “Once the Civil War started, none of them ascended to any position of power.”

And as for the New York Yacht Club? “It’s odd,” Calonius said. “My publisher did send them some material on the book, but they didn’t respond at all. It’s a history they don’t like to mention. Maybe they’ll step forward.”

Jekyll Island and Savannah already have. The state of Georgia recently announced a memorial to the Wanderer to be erected on Jekyll Island, and in Savannah, a walking tour of sites connected with the Wanderer is set to be in place next spring.

Erik Calonius has reason to be proud to have brought this troubling chapter in American history again to light. Readers have reason to learn from it.

Categories
Living Spaces Real Estate

The Bookshelf

Investment in a home is a huge commitment with an equally sized potential for profit. But don’t just take our word for it. Here are five books already released or coming out soon that offer advice that can guide you to a great buy and a wise investment. — Greg Akers

Make Money in Abandoned Properties: How to Identify & Buy Vacant Properties & Make a Huge Profit (Wiley)

Chantal Howell Carey and Bill Carey

Now Available

$34.95

Working under the axiom that one man’s trash is another’s treasure, this book swears to be the only reliable and comprehensive guide to abandoned-property investment. It provides “ten tips for finding abandoned properties, five techniques for locating owners, five keys to the foolproof offer, and four ways to obtain financing.”

The Wall Street Journal: Complete Real-Estate Investing Guidebook (Three Rivers Press)

David Crook

December 2006

$14.95

Don’t let the author’s name fool you: Crook is the editor of The Wall Street Journal Sunday, which is syndicated in newspapers around the globe. This book claims to be the authority on real estate investing and teaches you how to avoid schemes, get financing, make contacts, find the right properties, and more.

Nothing Down for Women: The Smart Woman’s Quick-Start Guide to Real Estate Investing (Free Press)

Robert G. Allen and Karen Nelson Bell

January 2007

For the woman on the go, this book swears it can give the basics of real estate investment in short chapters that can be read and fully understood in less than five minutes. It includes scripts for communications with buyers and sellers and templates for sales ads.

The Complete Guide to Purchasing a Condo, Townhouse, or Apartment: What Smart Investors Need to Know — Explained Simply (Atlantic Publishing Company)

Susan Smith Alvis

January 2007

$24.95

This book guarantees an easy overview on this specialty market, including what to expect from the many people involved (realtors, condo boards, attorneys, bankers) and hints and tips on what to look for and how to avoid common mistakes.

Beyond the Bubble: How to Keep the Real Estate Market in Perspective — And Profit No Matter What Happens (AMACOM)

Michael C. Thomsett and Joshua Kahr

February 2007

$16.95Are you considering real estate investment but afraid that the bubble will burst? This book will help you distinguish between the facts and the myths of real estate investment. Published by AMACOM, the book publishing division of the American Management Association, this book also offers ideas for what to do even when sales hit a slump. ●

Categories
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The Road

By Cormac McCarthy

Knopf, 241 pp., $24

Even in the small contemporary-fiction sub-genre we might call “The Post-Apocalypse Tales,” this new book by Cormac McCarthy, master of bleak, blasted landscapes, stands out. It is a wintry, hellish prophecy written in a terse, attenuated style perfectly suited to the backdrop of ash and ruin its nameless protagonists, father and son, traverse. McCarthy writes as if language itself is petering out, as stripped and barren as the countryside.

Thomas Mann said, “Language is civilization itself,” and in McCarthy’s collapsed world, there is little civilization left. The man and his son in The Road might be ghosts, doomed to walk the ruined Earth as witnesses. They might be ghosts, that is, if they weren’t condemned to an existence built solely on survival.

“By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp,” McCarthy writes early on. It is this grieving mother who tempers the brutality of the subsistence life the author outlines here. She is not quite God. Even in the father and son’s hopeless quest for food and shelter, McCarthy finds the imperishable kernel of common humanity. His characters, who worry about being the only “good people” left and who seem to encounter the bad people over and over, are drawn beautifully and in such few words. McCarthy’s basic humanism shines through, even on this dead road, a road only, in truth, a dreamscape, a diminished leftover of paved optimism.

Cormac McCarthy

In their wandering, which is really a quest (though we already know that at the end there won’t be a city of gold or a grail), the father and boy scrabble through garbage — garbage already scrabbled through. They find a few houses, which offer brief rest. Occasionally, they find things, objects from the lost civilization. Mechanical things that will never work again. Toys once loved. And books.

McCarthy’s last book, No Country for Old Men, published a little over a year ago, received some of the worst reviews of his career. I was in the minority: I saw it as an exercise in thriller writing and thought it spare and mean and as fast-paced as a getaway car. Now McCarthy has followed it with what his fans may recognize as a return to his earlier, stark, haunting and haunted books, which now seem only a tune-up for The Road. I will say it plain: This is the best piece of fiction I’ve read this year, and it may be the best novel McCarthy has written.

I’ll not ruin the ending for the reader, but the story, which seemingly has nowhere to go, manages to conjure revelations and hope. Cormac McCarthy, the master of sinister, visionary landscapes, has created here a human and humane book, which, one can only hope, will outlast our worst visions and endgames.

— Corey Mesler

Twilight

By William Gay

MacAdam Cage, 300 pp., $25

Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: William Gay’s Twilight is a straightforward novel. In an era where even “literature” has taken a fancy for the cute, convoluted, artificial plot device, this is a good thing. A number of authors seem to think that if their subject matter is obscure enough or if their narrative is slick enough, they can somehow elect not to say anything over the course of 300 pages. Gay avoids this trap by concentrating on telling the story first and foremost and letting his style evolve out of that goal.

In Twilight, teenager Kenneth Tyler discovers that the local undertaker, Fenton Breece, has become a little too intimate with the dead. The problem is that the only sheriff with any eye for justice lives in the neighboring county. To find him, Tyler must trek through an eerie backwoods while avoiding the hit man Breece has hired to cover Tyler’s tracks for good.

The way the plot unfolds is a little reminiscent of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, but what makes the story so effective is Gay’s masterfully controlled voice — a voice that has earned him the title of “the last genuine heir to Faulkner” from author and Rhodes College professor Marshall Boswell. That voice is just so natural. The narrative emerges from a collection of anecdotes that, pieced together, represent the collective memory of the small community where the story takes place.

This is not to say that Twilight is perfect. Almost every adventure story involving a teenager has to trudge through an awkward explanation of the obvious solutions to the central conflict before the plot can get rolling. Twilight is no exception. Tyler has some incriminating photos. Okay. Why not go straight to the police? Why not drive to the next town? Why not tell everybody about your evidence and be on your way? Gay deals with these questions, but a couple of times it’s obvious that he’s trying to get the action going. At least twice, for example, the action shifts because a truck doesn’t start.

These problems are superficial, though. Twilight marks a great success for Gay and proves that he’s much more than a passing figure on the Southern literary landscape. — Zac Hill

Nature Girl

By Carl Hiaasen

Knopf, 306 pp., $25.95

 

Honey Santana is off her meds again. She is out of work and up to mischief. Disgusted with telemarketers who persistently interrupt her suppertime and conversations with the 12-year-old son she adores, Honey tracks down one especially rude, oily voiced caller and contrives to teach him a lesson in respect.

Carl Hiaasen

Also unemployed after calling Honey a dried-up old skank (she had berated him for being a professional pest), Boyd Shreave is aware of the irony when he accepts an offer to take an eco-tour of the Florida Everglades in exchange for sitting through the accompanying sales pitch for land breathtakingly close to the tracts he had peddled during his brief tenure with Relentless, Inc. There is little reason to stay in Fort Worth (not even his wife and mother like him) and several arguments for using the free plane tickets provided by Honey’s ex-husband.  (Boyd’s mistress, Eugenie Fonda, doesn’t like him either, but she’s always up for an adventure and the hope for better prospects.)

Sammy Tigertail, half white and half Seminole, has secluded himself in the Ten Thousand Islands to find peace with his heritage and harmony with the Gibson guitar his half-brother snagged from the local Hard Rock establishment. He also needs to come to terms with the ghost of a man whose body he has improperly disposed of in Lostmans River.

Honey’s party and an entourage of which she is unaware, as well as an FSU coed and a spirited evangelistic group, encamp on Dismal Key, the island where Sammy Tigertail had expected to find solitude but discovers instead that life at its barest can be as intrusive and perturbing as a telemarketing call.

Nature Girl by Carl Hiassen is brightly jacketed; its numerous characters and exotic landscape deftly drawn. Tidbits of Seminole history lend plausibility to a series of outrageous events. The book is fun, especially on a cold day when prickly heat and insect-slapping are the stuff of a distant place. — Linda Baker

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists

By Gideon Defoe

Pantheon Books, 166 pp., $15.95

Imagine watching a Scooby Doo-style mystery acted out by the cast of Monty Python in pirate costumes while you’re high on some dank weed. Or skip the weed and forget about imagining anything. Read Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists, which is similar to the above scenario.

The third book in a series of nautical adventures, Defoe’s laugh-out-loud book follows the escapades of a ditzy, narcissistic Pirate Captain and his crew, who are identified by their defining characteristics (e.g., the pirate with the gout, the pirate with bedroom eyes, the albino pirate, etc.).

In a case of mistaken identity, the Pirate Captain is arrested in Victorian London when his ship docks for a shopping trip. The police have taken the captain for Karl Marx. Once the mistake is cleared up, though, the captain encounters the real Marx (whom he later mistakes for a hairy sea creature due to Marx’s abundant facial, chest, and back hair).

But someone has also been asking people to do unspeakable acts (like drowning kittens) in the name of communism in an attempt to give Marx a bad name, so the captain agrees to help Marx escape his bad rep.

The crew sets sail for France, where they discover a similar plot to destroy communism. (People are raising the price of tiny dogs, and dancing girls have stopped going panty-less in favor of bucket pants, all in the name of communism.) Together Marx, Pirate Captain, and his crew (who tend to describe things in terms of typefaces) set out to unmask the culprit.

Throughout the book, Defoe manages to mix nonsensical jokes with subtle social commentary. Take for example, this paragraph:

“Back in those days the Thames wasn’t the beautiful crystal-clear colour it is today, and it didn’t have children splashing playfully about on its sandy banks. It was grey and drab and had old shopping carts floating in it. And you couldn’t cup your hands in the river and drink its delicious water like you can now, on account of all the pollution. Pollution came from factories, because the factories of Victorian times didn’t make iPods and Internets and shiny DVDs — they made large clouds of black smoke, which were sold to countries that didn’t have much in the way of clouds, like Africa.”

Defoe’s humorous prose is also peppered with footnotes containing useless trivia. For example, did you know that the armadillo has the longest period of REM sleep? Or that the biggest flag in the world belongs to Brazil and weighs about as much as two fat manatees?

Equal parts witty and absurd, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists will put a smile on the face of even the stiffest reader. If the book were a typeface, it’d be comical — like Chalkboard Bold.

— Bianca Phillips

Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

By Lou DuBose and Jake Bernstein

Random House, 262 pp., $24.95

 

To be sure, there is a shortcut or two in this summation of the life and times of the current vice president of the United States.

But, if it is something less than a full-scale biography, this concise little book is also something more than a mere brief against a public figure — one whose enduring effect on the life of the republic is summed up, as the authors see it, both in the title word “Vice” and in a subtitle that all but charges Dick Cheney with high crimes and misdemeanors.

Consider it a Cliff’s Notes for the hitherto uninformed, a Dick Cheney for Dummies. And for a final chapter that may lay too much emphasis on the pending (and likely anti-climactic) trial of former Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, readers can substitute an alternate resolution: the judgment just rendered by the American electorate.

For the two Texas-based authors, veteran muckrakers and foes of the current administration, make a compelling case that the complex of national-security and foreign-policy issues apparently repudiated in last month’s elections are to a large degree the creations of Cheney. That includes not only the ill-fated Iraq war but also a variety of assaults against habeas corpus and due process and a policy-making apparatus that has all too often bypassed not only Congress but, the authors suggest, President George W. Bush himself.

DuBose and Bernstein — the former a collaborator with Molly Ivins in the anti-Bush screeds Shrub and Bushwhacked; the latter a chronicler of alleged misdeeds by former House majority leader Tom DeLay — are by no means unbiased judges. But they give Cheney credit where they see it as due: as an efficient secretary of defense under the first president Bush, for example, and one who concurred then that to have pursued regime change during the first Gulf War of 1991 would have invited the same disasters that have occurred in the course of the second one.

Though they shy away from psycho-history as such, the authors imply that the change in Cheney’s thinking owes much to a series of heart attacks that led him closer to the brink of death than has been publicly acknowledged. In any case, both Cheney and the government he looms so large in have clearly succumbed to an ever-hardening belief in the unbridled use of power.

As one of many clues as to who was the actual architect of our ongoing national policy, the authors conclude “[i]t wasn’t George Bush” and offer this: “The vice president’s national security staffers read all the e-mail traffic ‘in, out, and between’ the president’s [National Security Council] staffers … . Yet the president’s staff isn’t allowed to read the communication of Cheney’s staffers.” Q.E.D. And if that ain’t vice, it’s getting ominously close. — Jackson Baker

Mary Poppins, She Wrote:

The Life of P.L. Travers

By Valerie Lawson

Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $25

In Mary Poppins, She Wrote, biographer Valerie Lawson painstakingly pieces together the life of P.L. Travers, the woman who created Mary Poppins, the much-loved nanny who blew in with the wind to save the Banks family. Careful readers of the Poppins books recognize that all was not light with the heroine, however. Poppins had an edge.

Travers too had an edge. Born in 1899, she had a tough childhood but was endlessly independent. She dabbled in acting, against her family’s wishes, and while still in her early 20s, she moved by herself from her native Australia to London to pursue a writing career. She knew Yeats and T.S. Eliot, and her close relationship with the Irish poet George Russell led her to a devotion to mysticism. She suffered from stomach problems for much of her life, most probably had lesbian affairs, and, though never married, adopted a son through odd circumstances.

The first Poppins book was published in the 1930s and was popular from the start. After years of courting by Walt Disney, Travers finally relented to a movie version, which was released in 1964 and went on to win five Academy Awards. The movie made Travers rich, but she didn’t much care for it. To Travers, Disney and his writers didn’t grasp what Poppins was all about, and, when inevitably asked for clarification, the writer was snappish and evasive.

Lawson tries to provide the context that led Travers to create the legendary Mary Poppins character. She examines Travers’ devotion to the idea of woman as nymph, mother, and crone and posits that Travers was searching for her own Mr. Banks. Mary Poppins, She Wrote is admirably exhaustive on the subject, yet what’s most striking is its tone.

Lawson doesn’t seem to like Travers, much less respect her. It begins in the preface with a defensive strike against the defensive writer’s wish for privacy.

Travers said often that she wanted her private life kept that way. But Lawson reasons that since Travers sold her papers (including personal correspondence), Travers wasn’t serious, and, in any case, Travers’ death would mean all bets were off. However, at the beginning of this project, Travers was still living. In fact, Lawson requested a meeting with her, which Travers was open to on the condition that they not talk about her but about her work. Lawson dropped the matter for 18 months before deciding to take it up again, but Travers died before they could meet. Given that Lawson first reached out to her when Travers was in her mid-90s, it didn’t occur to her that her subject wouldn’t be around much longer?

The core of Mary Poppins, She Wrote is that Travers, though not without insecurities, was strong-willed, a trait that was responsible for her success but isolated her and made her more and more irascible as the years went on. Perhaps Lawson didn’t want to deal with her and postponed serious work on the book until after Travers was gone — conveniently out of sight like Mary Poppins swept away by the wind. — Susan Ellis

Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life

By Linda H. Davis

Random House, 365 pp., $29.95

If you’ve heard of Charles Addams, it’s probably because of the 1960s television sitcom The Addams Family, with its oddly lovable family of spooks — Morticia, Gomez, Lurch, Uncle Fester, Wednesday, and Pugsley. But the story behind those weird characters and their decrepit Victorian mansion goes back to 1933, when Addams, a struggling young cartoonist, managed to sell his first “drawing” to The New Yorker.

That cartoon featured a hockey player standing in his socks on the ice next to two other players. The caption: “I forgot my skates.” It’s hard to say what The New Yorker editors saw in that decidedly unfunny (at least, to a 2006 sensibility) cartoon, but it led to three other New Yorker sales for Addams that year.

Addams kept meticulous records of his sales, and author Linda Davis has written a meticulously detailed account of Addams’ eccentric and surprising life. Using apparently unfettered access to Addams’ letters, papers, and journals, she spends much of the first third of the book in a matter-of-fact recounting of the cartoonist’s childhood and his progress in making inroads at The New Yorker. One fears Davis’ style is too actuarial to compel a casual reader through these chapters, unless they have a prior interest in Addams. The early chapters are a dry slog, for the most part.

But things get more interesting as Addams’ life gets more complex. He was an odd-looking fellow, with a large bulbous nose and slicked-back hair, but he became a bon vivant who moved in high society — a lover of fast cars, fine cigars, and beautiful women (including Joan Fontaine, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy). But it was a woman with the rather odd name of Barbara Barb who most impacted Addams’ life. She looked like a “bimbo” and she looked like Morticia — and she was a lawyer: a lethal combo that gave Addams all he could handle for many years.

Charles Addams becomes an interesting read after Davis warms to her subject in the middle section of the book. Or perhaps it’s that Addams just becomes more interesting. Either way, it’s a life worth reading about.

— Bruce VanWyngarden

House of Hilton:

From Conrad to Paris: A Drama of Wealth, Power, and Privilege

By Jerry Oppenheimer

Crown, 277 pp., $24.95

It was the sex tape that spawned an empire. A Night in Paris took this generation’s foremost celebutante and turned her — however improbably — into a marketable brand for perfume, video games, books, and television programs.

Or so says Jerry Oppenheimer, author of Front Row: Anna Wintour, Just Desserts: Martha Stewart, The Other Mrs. Kennedy, and now House of Hilton. In it, Oppenheimer tries to solve the riddle of how a woman like Paris came into being.

The answer is part ambition and drive, part greed and gold-digging. The main hypothesis in Oppenheimer’s tell-all — if a book about Paris Hilton can be said to have a hypothesis — is that Paris is a product of her lineage. From Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate who started his empire with a flophouse in Amarillo, Texas, Paris got her eye for opportunity and her reputed business acumen. From her mother, Kathy, and her grandmother, Big Kathy, she got her appetite for stardom.

In this breathless, Enquirer­-like look at the Hilton clan, Oppenheimer portrays a family tree rife with bad seeds. Big Kathy is a “stage mother from hell” who tells her daughters to marry rich. Paris’ parents, Rick and Kathy, are opportunists who party all the time and exploit the Hilton name for discounted hotel rooms and apartments, comp’ed food and drink, and even free babysitting at hotels around the world. And beginning with Conrad Sr. — who married Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1942 and then divorced her in 1946 — the Hilton men appear to have had an eye for the ladies — the younger, the better. (And Conrad [Nick] Jr.?: His marriage to Elizabeth Taylor in 1950 lasted 205 days.)

Despite her behavior and the behavior of the rest of her family, Oppenheimer contends that the success Paris has created should be respected. Despite their many flaws, both Conrad and his son Barron (Paris’ grandfather) believed their children should make their own way in the world. Paris is rich, but her father is one of eight children and she’s one of four, so she isn’t in line for a big inheritance. “No doubt Paris’s great-grandfather would be extremely proud of the Hilton entrepreneurial spirit that Paris had inherited and was aggressively exhibiting,” Oppenheimer writes. And though she has her detractors, her products — albums, movies, perfume — sell. As Paris has declared, “I’m laughing all the way to the bank.”

I guess the joke is on us.

— Mary Cashiola

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

By Michael Lewis

Norton, 299 pp., $24.95

Quarterback insurance. That’s what football coaches and scouts call men who play left tackle on the offensive line. For a right-handed quarterback dropping back to pass, a left tackle protects his blind side. Which is why the finest left tackles earn more money in today’s NFL than any position other than quarterback.

In his aptly titled The Blind Side, Michael Lewis — best-selling author of Moneyball — chronicles the discovery and gridiron development of Michael Oher, a hulk of a young man (6’5″ and 350 pounds as a high school junior) who finds that his one way out of an impoverished, dead-end youth is the potential he embodies for greatness as an NFL left tackle.

The son of an alcoholic mother and a father he barely knew (and who died violently), Oher transfers from Memphis’ Westwood High to the private Briarcrest Christian School after his freshman year but only after capturing the eye of BCS football coach Hugh Freeze. An African American, Oher is exposed to a world of affluence and academia he would have never seen without the care of Sean Tuohy, a former basketball star at Ole Miss (and current TV analyst for the Memphis Grizzlies), who has a daughter at Briarcrest and eventually adopts Oher as his son. Tuohy’s role in steering Oher’s academic development is critical to whatever college future his adopted son might have. As for the means? Writes Lewis, “One of the lessons [Tuohy] had picked up from his own career as an NCAA student-athlete was that good enough grades were available to anyone who bothered to exploit the loopholes.”

Oher’s overnight stardom is so astonishing it’s troubling. Having never played organized football until his junior year at Briarcrest, Oher receives scholarship offers from, according to Lewis, every major college program except Penn State. He decides to attend Ole Miss, where he’s now a sophomore and Freeze is an assistant to head coach Ed Orgeron.

Lewis is a fine story-teller, and his venture into the game of football includes a nice history lesson on the passing game. It’s the creative minds behind modern football that give the book its subtitle: “Evolution of a Game.” During the 1980s, protecting a football team’s most valuable instrument — its quarterback — took on a new premium as pass-rushing monsters like the New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor were winning games by themselves. When free agency arrived in 1993 and opened the salary structure for players who didn’t pass the ball (or rush the passer) for a living, the market for talented left tackles blew the lid off preconceived notions of a lineman’s value. This is insider football, and a reader not familiar with the game’s positional nuances may be turned off by chapters devoted to such. But this “evolution” is precisely why a teenage behemoth from the Memphis slums is worth a book.

The Blind Side isn’t so much a human-interest story as it is a tale of football interest. And it’s the confluence of lives — and interests — around Michael Oher that gives the tale its weight. A boy giant — seemingly born to block — finds himself behind his own “blockers” intent on clearing the way to pro football and unlimited wealth. About the only question left would seem to be who has Michael Oher’s blind side?

— Frank Murtaugh

Sloth

By Gilbert Hernandez

Vertigo, 128 pp., $19.99

Gilbert Hernandez’ Sloth presents two seemingly parallel stories about teens Miguel, Lita, and Romeo, and those stories turn on the myth of a satyr and a lemon orchard.

The book opens as Miguel has just woken up from a one-year coma. Upon waking, Miguel is healthy but left with the need to slow everything down: his gait, his speech, his lovemaking, the songs his band plays.

Miguel also reconnects with girlfriend Lita and bandmate Romeo — who may or may not rival Miguel for Lita’s affections.

Miguel has had recurring dreams for years about lemons raining down from the sky, prompting him to hope that “dreams are dreams and don’t have anything to do with reality.” After the trio investigates the urban legend of the lemon orchard’s Goatman, events unfold that prove his hopes wrong.

Hernandez is best known for his long-running serial Love & Rockets. His Palomar stories in that series are just about the best thing ever created in the comic-book medium. Amazingly, Sloth is Hernandez’ first original graphic novel.

Hernandez possibly is better than any writer at capturing the tenebrous years between childhood and adulthood. (One challenger to that claim is his Love & Rockets co-writing brother, Jaime.) In Sloth, teens are challenged by pain, loneliness, and an aching to connect, but they are also empowered by courage, joy, loyalty, and supernatural levels of willpower.

Hernandez’ cartoon art is equally excellent. His pen captures faces with a few deft details, and in the faces of adults, you can see the youngsters they once were. It reinforces a common theme in Hernandez’ stories: You can’t escape your childhood. Perhaps that’s why Hernandez is so fascinated by it.

With Sloth, Hernandez has added to what is already a spectacular body of work. It’s further evidence that he’s one of the most exciting and entertaining voices in the field of graphic novels.

— Greg Akers

33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume 1

Edited by David Barker

Continuum, 264 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Like most best-of compilations, 33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume 1 is only a partial portrait of a larger subject, in this case Continuum’s popular series that features writers from different backgrounds extolling the virtues of their favorite albums. The series’ greatest virtue is its breadth: Contributors include academics, critics, and musicians, who expound on rock, pop, funk, hip-hop, soul, folk, dance, alternative, and Prince. Admirably, editor David Barker dictates no approach to the albums, allowing the writers to consider the music academically, historically, or autobiographically. The result is a diverse and multifaceted series that covers not just the range of popular music but the gamut of pop-music criticism.

Excerpting chapters from the first 20 installments, 33 1/3 Greatest Hits ably showcases this essential variety. Musicians tend to reminisce: Colin Meloy of the Decemberists describes the teenage thrill of hearing the Replacements on his transistor radio, and Joe Pernice’s take on the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder, which recalls a teen suicide that shocked his Massachusetts suburb, barely touches on the album at all, yet feels strangely relevant.

Not every author features himself so prominently. Andrew Hultkrans’ detailed exegesis of Love’s Forever Changes touches on Arthur Lee’s paranoia but only hints that it mirrors Hultkrans’ own. Best is Warren Zanes’ string of anecdotes on interviewing Jerry Wexler about Dusty in Memphis, which at first reads like mere digressions but adds up to an important explication of the power of Southern music in the 1960s.

The diversity that makes 33 1/3 Greatest Hits such an intriguing series also means a listener won’t agree with every approach. The autobiographical chapters often leave no room to discuss the workings of the music, and the more academic approaches sometimes lapse into dry exposition.

The excerpts assembled here, unlike the songs that populate greatest-hits albums, weren’t written to be collected, and this compilation can be frustrating. Just when you start getting into a chapter, it ends. And there are no introductions or writer bios to contextualize the selections. 33 1/3 Greatest Hits is nevertheless a useful introduction to contemporary rock writing, revealing a discipline as diverse as its subject. It is, however, no substitute for the complete series. — Stephen Deusner