Welcome to the hinterlands: a narrative nonfiction blog

Crossing stories with crossover appeal: new nonfiction

Because it's summer, I've been hanging out over at my other blog (OpenWaterSwimming) and in the briny deep.  What did I do on my summer vacation?  I swam across the Chesapeake Bay.  Again.  (In the skinny part—4.4 miles—in the Great Chesapeake Bay Swim.  It's kind of a Channel Swim Lite.)

However, three new works of narrative biography washing up on our summer reading list promise suitable crossover appeal between my literary and aquatic selves. 

The first—and I'll allow that the connection is tenuous—is a biography of Lord Byron, Byron in Love: a Short Daring Life by Edna O'Brien.  How is this relevant? you may ask.  Because putting aside his dissipation, his incestuous love affair with his half-sister, and his early death from what Kathryn Harrison in a review in the NYT succinctly calls his "course of sybaritic abandon," there was that time when he allegedly swam the Hellespont (and now you can too), AKA the Dardanelles, the narrow strip of water separating Europe from Asia.  Was there independent verification of this swim?  Does Lord Byron, given his general habits, strike you as man ready to tackle a several-mile swim in strong currents?  (Well, no, now he certainly doesn't since he's been dead some little while. But I mean at the time.)  I'll let you be the judge.  Whatever his swimming skills, he seems otherwise to have been a fairly unsavory piece of work.

So we turn now to a brighter spirit, the enterprising young Gertrude Ederle, subject of not one but two summer-release biographies, bringing the total to three Ederle books in the last 18 months.  Something of a trend here.   In 1926, at the age of 19, American Trudy became the first woman to swim the English Channel, arriving home to wild acclaim and a ticker tape parade in NYC.

For your reading delectation we have:

America's Girl: The Incredible Story of How Swimmer Gertrude Ederle Changed the Nation by Tim Dahlberg, Mary Ederle Ward, and Brenda Greene.  No reviews yet for this August release, but here's the publisher's synopsis:

America’s Girl is an intimate look at the life and trials of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 not only became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, but broke the record set by men. The feat so thrilled America that it welcomed her home with a ticker tape parade that drew two million people. This fascinating portrait follows Ederle from her early days as a competitive swimmer through her gold medal triumph at the 1924 Olympics, to the first attempt the next year by Ederle to swim from France to England in frigid and turbulent waters, a feat that had been conquered by only five men up to that time. This is also a stirring look at the go-go era of the 1920s, when the country was about to recognize that women not only could vote, but compete on an international scale as athletes. At the height of Prohibition, Ederle’s triumph over the formidable Channel was a triumph for women everywhere.

Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World by Glenn Stout, and a starred review from PW:

In 1926, 18-year-old Trudy Ederle fascinated and inspired millions around the world when she became the first woman successfully to swim the English Channel. With great storytelling, sportswriter Stout (series editor of The Best American Sports Writing) chronicles Ederle's singular accomplishment and its significance for the future of women in sports as well as the tremendous challenges for any swimmer who would dare traverse the waves of the channel. At age five, Ederle (1908–2003) suffered permanent hearing loss, which made her reticent and shy; at age 10 her father taught her to swim. The ocean opened to her like another world, and she loved the feeling of floating and swimming in its vastness. After lessons at the Women's Swimming Association, Ederle developed her gift and emerged as one of America's fastest swimmers, earning a spot in the 1924 Olympics. Disappointed by winning only a bronze medal, she quickly turned to the challenge of swimming the English Channel—difficult due to its strong tides, winds and currents—and after an initial failure, Ederle conquered the channel on August 6, 1926. Stout's moving book recovers the exhilarating story of a young girl who found her true self out in the water and paved the way for women in sports today.

 and finally, the early entry, 2008's

The Great Swim, by Gavin Mortimer (no subtitle, but a one-paragraph synopsis on the cover, an interesting alternative to the subtitle-that-gives-away-the-whole-plot, with which, I have been known to complain, too many narrative nonfiction books are unfairly burdened).  Here the starred review is from Booklist:

In 1926 four American women—Gertrude Ederle, Mille Gade, Lillian Cannon, and Clarabelle Barrette—competed to do something no woman had ever done: swim across the English Channel. Tabloid newspapers promoted their favorites, and the public was enthralled, eagerly  embracing the opportunity to put aside their worries (it hadn’t even been a decade since the Great War). Mortimer draws on a variety of source material, from people who were involved in the competition to contemporary  news reports and personal diaries, and the picture he paints from that material evokes an episode that, even though it took place eight decades ago, seems strangely familiar and contemporary. As in all the best narrative nonfiction, the text works back and forth in time, portraying the lives of the swimmers and providing vivid detail about the era, which spawned the nation’s first wave of national sports heroes (Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, et al.). The book can be read as the story of a sporting competition or as an exploration of our timeless fascination with celebrity. Either way, it’s an absorbing and inspirational saga in the Seabiscuit mold

The Unlikely War Bride

Reviewed in this week's NYTimes book review: I Love a Man in Uniform.  The Times calls it "a humorous, moving, and surprising account of married life in today's military."  The setup is that Burana, who, as the PW review notes, has "a decidedly checkered past, from accidental teenage communist to peep-show girl and stripper in New York and San Francisco," meets and falls in love with an Army major.  The two hastily marry before he is shipped off to Iraq, and what follows for Burana is the fallout and coming to terms with her unlikely new life as an Army wife, set against the long folly of the Iraq war.

The book sounds like it has some punch, but I think the publisher picked the wrong cover design.  It's the kind of design that telegraphs insubstantial advice/diet book/lame celebrity biography rather than a memoir that, reviews suggest, is much more substantial.

The Washington Post review:

Although it may sound like a case of opposites attracting -- punky anarchist marries career soldier -- Lily Burana makes clear that she and her husband are really birds of a feather, even if they come from different flocks. When Burana, who made her name with an earlier memoir about working as a stripper, met Mike, an Army officer, she couldn't imagine what they could share, beyond "mutual curiosity." Yet both were smart, funny, driven and idealistic, and, as they grew closer, they found even more in common, including wounds from traumas both military (his) and domestic (hers). Burana can be hilarious, especially when she skewers the Stepford-style advice once given to Army wives. Upon reading a 1940s book declaring that "Army men like feminine frippery . . . furs, snow-white gloves, and high-heeled slippers," Burana retorts, "But what should I wear?" Still, the book shifts easily into more emotional territory as she navigates loneliness and worry when her husband is deployed to the Middle East. "War is hell and waiting is hell and war is waiting," she writes. Even worse can be the marital aftershocks when soldiers return home. As both these spouses battle their demons, it becomes clear that this Army wife matches her husband in grit and persistence, even if she expresses it with more sass than brass.

New nonfiction news - Starbucks picks Crazy for the Storm

The upcoming memoir Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival (release date, June) is the next featured book selection from Starbucks. Here's the book description from the publisher:

From the age of three, Norman Ollestad was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing by the intense, charismatic father he both idolized and resented. While his friends were riding bikes, playing ball, and going to birthday parties, young Norman was whisked away in pursuit of wild and demanding adventures. Yet it were these exhilarating tests of skill that prepared "Boy Wonder," as his father called him, to become a fearless champion—and ultimately saved his life. Flying to a ski championship ceremony in February 1979, the chartered Cessna carrying Norman, his father, his father's girlfriend, and the pilot crashed into the San Gabriel Mountains and was suspended at 8,200 feet, engulfed in a blizzard. "Dad and I were a team, and he was Superman," Ollestad writes. But now Norman's father was dead, and the devastated eleven-year-old had to descend the treacherous, icy mountain alone. Set amid the spontaneous, uninhibited surf culture of Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s, this riveting memoir, written in crisp Hemingwayesque prose, recalls Ollestad's childhood and the magnetic man whose determination and love infuriated and inspired him—and also taught him to overcome the indomitable. As it illuminates the complicated bond between an extraordinary father and his son, Ollestad's powerful and unforgettable true story offers remarkable insight for us all.

Now Reading

George Being George, an oral history of the life of George Plimpton, which is quite entertaining.  I've only just gotten to the part where he's kicked out of Exeter and goes to Harvard anyway (ah, those were the days).  Apparently, both his behavior and his grades were found wanting.  Reproduced in the book is a two page letter from Plimpton's father, during Plimpton's time at Exeter, exhorting and instructing George on all the points academic and behavioral on which George ought to exert himself.  It's funny and sad at once--a father so intent on making his child the son he wants that he can't see the son he has.  At any rate, that's my 2-cent psychoanalysis.

Here's a PW review:

Starred Review. This superb, exuberant oral biography of editor-author-actor Plimpton (1927–2003) is described by Aldrich as a kind of literary party, George's last. As the subtitle makes clear—George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals—and a Few Unappreciative Observers—this is modeled after the cut-and-paste technique employed in Edie, Plimpton and Jean Stein's book about actress-model Edie Sedgwick. In addition to Plimpton family members, the 200 voices that speak here include David Amram, Harold Bloom, Christopher Cerf, Jules Feiffer, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Gay Talese and Gore Vidal. The chronological coverage spans Plimpton's life, from his privileged childhood, education at Exeter and Harvard and life in the U.K. at King's College, Cambridge, to his books, movies and legendary parties. His five decades editing the Paris Review and the inner workings of that publication are detailed in depth. When one scans any page at random in this appealing assemblage of anecdotes, it becomes difficult to stop reading. Plimpton's colorful personality emerges in a high-definition prismatic portrait.

Reading rotation

I seem to read much the way I do projects, which is to say that I start one book, then another, then perhaps another, and the latest New Yorker, and I read them in rotation until I finish or tire of one or all.  I also almost invariably begin reading books in the middle and then start skipping backward and forward until, again, I've finished the book or tired of it.  Also, I always read the New Yorker back-to-front, starting by reading all the cartoons first.  What Does It All Mean?

So, currently in rotation:  Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered...  along with Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven and an Everest memoir, Dead Lucky, because I can't resist polar exploration and mountaineering stories.

Undress Me.... is a travel memoir by Susan Jane Gilman, in which she and a college friend, both recently graduated, set off to explore China in 1986.  Why they went, I don't know yet, because I started the book  in the middle, of course.  There's been a good deal of gripping drama and adventure from there forward, however.  Without giving the story away, things go awry in a manner that is decidedly unexpected and not your typical kind of traveler's trouble.

Kirkus called it "an ambitious and intimate coming-of-age novel." (Is this a new Kirkus policy to bill memoirs as novels?  For the record, the author notes that only names and distinguishing characteristics of characters have been changed.) 

Dead Lucky is mountaineer Lincoln Hall's memoir of being left for dead high in Everest's "Death Zone." Following a successful summiting of the mountain, Hall became increasingly incoherent and then, at 28,000 feet, apparently unconscious from cerebral edema.  The Sherpas struggling to get him down the mountain tried desperately to revive him for several hours, even poking him in the eyeballs without getting any response, before finally they had to leave him in order to save their own lives as night fell.  After a night without shelter or oxygen,  a night during which his family at home in Australia was informed that he was dead, inexplicably Hall was found alive and reasonably lucid the next morning in the precarious perch where he had been left.  (Pictures and an interesting on-the-scene account from one of the climbers who found him are here on EverestNews.com.)

Subtitled "Life After Death on Everest," the book grapples interestingly with the question Hall can't answer: how was it possible to be virtually dead in one of the most inhospitable places on the Earth and yet somehow live? 

Let the best-of battles begin

Amazon picks its Best Books of 2008 (interestingly, not dividing between fiction and nonfiction), but puts more procrastination punch in the list with multiple sub-categories, including Best Covers, Featured Categories, Most Polarizing, and Best Book Videos.  Apparently the book video is the new must-have in the author's arsenal of promotional tools.

Apropos of Amazon, remember those early days when people kept predicting the Amazon business model could never work? 

PW offers its best-of list as well.

New Nonfiction - Now Reading

The Wordy Shipmates, the latest from Sarah Vowell.  An interesting look at the roots of the American belief, by way of the Puritans, in our "city on the hill" place in the world.  From PW:

Starred Review. Essayist and public radio regular Vowell (Assassination Vacation) revisits America's Puritan roots in this witty exploration of the ways in which our country's present predicaments are inextricably tied to its past. In a style less colloquial than her previous books, Vowell traces the 1630 journey of several key English colonists and members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Foremost among these men was John Winthrop, who would become governor of Massachusetts. While the Puritans who had earlier sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower were separatists, Winthrop's followers remained loyal to England, spurred on by Puritan Reverend John Cotton's proclamation that they were God's chosen people. Vowell underscores that the seemingly minute differences between the Plymouth Puritans and the Massachusetts Puritans were as meaningful as the current Sunni/Shia Muslim rift. Gracefully interspersing her history lesson with personal anecdotes, Vowell offers reflections that are both amusing (colonial history lesson via The Brady Bunch) and tender (watching New Yorkers patiently waiting in line to donate blood after 9/11).

New Nonfiction

Susan Campbell, Dating Jesus: A story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl (January 2009 release date)

From the publisher: By the age of twelve, Susan Campbell had been flirting with Jesus for some time, and in her mind, Jesus had been flirting back. Why wouldn't he? She went to his house three times a week, sat in his living room, listened to his stories, loudly and lustily sang songs to him. So, one Sunday morning, she walked to the front of her fundamentalist Christian church to profess her love for Jesus and to be baptized.

But from the moment her robe floated to the surface of the baptistery water, she began to question her fundamentalist Christian faith. If baptism requires complete immersion underwater, what does it mean, she wondered, if a piece of fabric attached to a would-be Christian floats to the top? Does the baptism still count?

In this lovingly told tale, Susan Campbell takes us into the world of fundamentalism—a world where the details really, really matter. And she shows us what happened when she finally came to admit that in her faith, women would never be allowed a seat at the throne.

Michael Greenberg, Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir

Amazon review: (Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008) Michael Greenberg's spare, unflinching memoir begins with a bang: "On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad." Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the summer when fifteen-year-old Sally experienced her first full-blown manic episode—an event that in a "single stroke" changed her identity and, by extension, that of her entire family. Simply told and beautifully written, Greenberg's memoir shines a stark light on mental illness, painting a vivid picture of a brain and body under siege—mania as a separate living thing squatting within the patient. As a writer who lives "so much in his head," Greenberg is particularly anguished by his daughter's fractured psyche, and his honesty about being both sickened and fascinated by his daughter's condition is breathtaking: "During the worst moments, I think of her as my disease—the disease I must bear...I am intoxicated with Sally's madness in both senses of the word: inebriated and poisoned." So desperate is he to understand her, that he relentlessly researches mental illness (the book is peppered with fascinating insights into drug therapy and anecdotes about writers who struggled with madness), and even goes so far as to sample a full dose of his daughter's medication. Startling, heart-wrenching, and yet unwaveringly unsentimental, Hurry Down Sunshine is an unforgettable story of a young girl's descent into madness, told through the eyes of a harried and helpless father trying desperately to bring her back.

New book deals

Two recent book deals of possible interest. For the first, I note that in third grade we were all asked to do a report on a planet.  I picked Pluto, drawn to it, I think, because it was, like me, the smallest, and no doubt always picked last when it came time to choose teams for Solar System Kickball.  Alas, Pluto got demoted recently, and here to tell the tale is Mike Brown's new book.  From Publisher's Lunch "Lunch Weekly":

 Mike Brown's HOW I KILLED PLUTO AND WHY IT HAD IT COMING, a personal
 account of the most tumultuous year in modern astronomy and the
 astronomer who inadvertently caused it when, in an attempt to discover
 the tentth planet, he ended up demoting everyone's favorite planet,
 Pluto, to Cindy Spiegel at Spiegel & Grau, for publication in Sprin
 2010, by Marc Gerald and Caroline Greeven at The Agency Group.

And also from Lunch Weekly, a travel narrative:

 Andrew Beahrs's TWAIN'S FEAST: The American at the Table, the story of
 one man's search for America's lost foods, with Mark Twain as his guide,
 to Laura Stickney at Penguin Press, at auction, for publication in
 spring 2010, the 100th anniversary of Twain's death, by Emma Sweeney at
 Emma Sweeney Agency (NA).

New Nonfiction Monday

Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces by Robert Clark

PW says:

The Arno River flood that deluged Florence, Italy, in 1966—killing 33 people and damaging 14,000 works of art and countless books and antiques—frames this meditation on the relationship between art and life. Clark (River of the West) embarks first on a leisurely history of Florence's intertwined experience of great floods and great art, through the perceptions of Dante, Leonardo, E.M. Forster and other writers and artists. The world's rapt concern for Florence's cultural treasures contrasts sharply with its neglect of the city's inhabitants, Clark argues, offering his impressionistic account of the 1966 disaster as seen through the eyes of artists, photographers, volunteer mud angels who swarmed the city to help rescue its waterlogged art and Communist militants who organized relief for poor neighborhoods. He then follows the decades-long and rancorously debated restoration projects, especially the controversial rehabilitation of Cimabue's 13th-century Crucifix, seeing in them a metaphor for artistic beauty as an endless work-in-progress. Clark's study is sometimes unfocused, but by building up layers of atmospheric chiaroscuro—the drying city, he notes, lay lacquered in tints of warm earth and azzuro sky... like pigments just brushed on and still moist—he achieves an evocative portrait of Florence as its own greatest masterpiece.

Kitty Burns Florey, author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog (a book about diagramming sentences, which we visited here in the Hinterlands last spring, and which I found thoroughly enjoyable.  Despite my  general post-traumatic stress reaction to most memories of grade school, I did love diagramming sentences for some reason.  Scratch me, and not too deeply, and you will find a language geek, though I make no claims to being one of those eagle-eyed grammarians who can spot an improperly applied non-restrictive appositive from 50 paces, and come to think of it, a good copy-editor would probably gig me on that "eagle-eyed" too, with a sharp reminder to avoid cliched language) (not to mention run-on sentences), will be coming out with a book on handwriting in January: Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. 

In my junior year in high school, my English teacher, Howard Pugh, after no doubt battling the migraines induced by trying to read the scrawl that was my handwriting, suggested I either learn to type or improve my handwriting.  Handwriting was a subject much labored over in grade school, but obviously the lessons hadn't stuck. So in high school I taught myself italics AND I taught myself to type, with the Smith Corona 10 Day Touch Typing Course that came on a half-dozen 45 RPM records with the typewriter my parents gave me at the end of that school year (and back in those pre-computing days, could there have been any gift more delightful to a language geek?). 

As it happened, I didn't have ten days, as we were about to go away for the summer and leave the record player behind, so I crammed ten days worth of lessons into two, but somehow, got enough of the hang of it to become a decent enough typist that I graduated to the world of White-Out and erasable bond paper, which gave me a leg up in college, as this was back in the dark ages before children learned keyboarding while still in the nursery, and many people arrived at college never having written any way but by hand. 

These days I can type (though with some errors) at close to conversational speed, which is handy when interviewing people over the phone). As for my italics handwriting, it devolved considerably but retains a residual influence; when I am writing by hand, what I produce is still largely illegible, BUT if I put my mind to it, I can produce something much neater.  Recently, I was advised by an educational evaluator that the Junior Member of the Household, whose handwriting may be genetically doomed, has a "somewhat awkward pencil grip." 

"You should see mine," I said.

A few minutes later, I was taking notes, and the evaluator, glancing over, said in a voice of quiet horror, "Oh, I see what you mean."

I hold pencils, and pens, in a brutal death-grip involving all five fingers. I'm surprised my grade school, which was the kind of place that punished you for writing left-handed, didn't take me out back and beat with a yardstick for that grip, but I suppose my teachers must have concluded early-on that they would have to pick their battles.

 When I was younger, my father gave me a lovely silver Cross pen for my birthday, and I actually dented the case with that grip.  For years, I had a significant callus on my right-hand ring finger from the pressure of the pencil/pen against the finger.  When writing the answers to essay examinations in school, my hand would cramp painfully and I'd have to shake it out often. So all in all, it's no doubt a good thing I learned to type so long ago.

And now, with thanks to Bob Ericson for bringing it to our attention, Kitty Burns Florey diagrams Sarah Palin's sentences for Slate.