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Archive for April 2009
April 30, 2009
posted by Brad Tyer at 10:37 AM
Memory Lessons: A Doctor's Story
By Jerald Winakur
Hyperion
287 pages, $24.95
It’s often said that a writer’s most important tool is memory. When Pete Hamill, in his raucous memoir A Drinking Life, notices his memory beginning to fail him, he finally overturns an entire lifetime of alcohol acculturation and spurns the bottle rather than put his life’s work at risk.
Hamill at least had a choice in the matter. San Antonio physician Jerald Winakur has spent 30 years treating geriatric patients whose failing memories are attributable to causes both treatable and mysterious, which partially prepared him — and of course failed to completely prepare him — for the onset of his own father’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Memory Lessons: A Doctor’s Story, is Winakur’s new (published in January) memoir about these intersecting personal and professional trajectories, and in contrast to your typical (and typically self-published) medical remembrance, it’s garnered high literary praise from novelist Tim O’Brien, poet Edward Hirsch, and fellow San Antonio physician-turned-memoirist (turned novelist) Abraham Verghese, each of whom knows his way around the routes connecting language and the past.
Winakur will read with his wife, poet Lee Robinson, at Austin’s Barnes & Nobel-Arboretum, on Friday, May 1, at 7 p.m.
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April 27, 2009
posted by Brad Tyer at 02:46 PM
The Gay Place
By Billy Lee Brammer
University of Texas Press
560 pages
Scanning the Daily Beast‘s Book Beast blog this morning (okay, it’s a week old Book Beast entry, but we just stumbled across it today), we were pleased to see indirect props from former Bill Clinton advisor and UT grad Paul Begala. The Dem commentariat’s even-keeled yin to James Carville’s unhinged yang exposed the contents of his book bag in the Daily Beast’s version of the classic what’s-on-your-nightstand feature, and there, tucked in alongside the unsurprising (Daniel Yergin’s epic oil saga The Prize) and the predictable (Sidney Blumenthal’s The Clinton Wars), are two classics penned by former Texas Observer editors.
That’d be former editor (early 1960s) Willie Morris’ memoir North Toward Home and former managing editor (mid-1950s) Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place.
Begala notes that he and Carville have a running argument over the one true Great American Political Novel, with Begala lobbying for The Gay Place (which mythologizes Austin and centers on an LBJ stand-in named Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker) and Carville backing Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), which followed Huey B. Long-like Willie Stark’s ascent to corrupting power in the mid-century South, and to which The Gay Place (1961) bears some marked resemblances.
Anyone care to weigh in on the two books’ relative merits? And just to make this more fun, let’s toss a third political novel into the mix: Karen Olsson’s fine Waterloo (2005), which carries echoes of Brammer and Warren both, and shoehorns in an updated post-Slacker vibe for flavor.
Maybe the similarities are inevitable when you’re a journalist who writes about politics (Olsson co-edited the Observer during the early aughts) who writes a novel about politicians and journalists. Or maybe readers are just unable to read one novel containing politicians and journalists without reminding themselves of other novels containing politicians and journalists. It was political journalist David Halberstam, after all, who saddled Brammer with the Robert Penn Warren parallel in his glowing New York Times review of The Gay Place, and you still can’t buy a copy that doesn’t carry that blurb.
Okay folks, the subject is great political novels. Ready. Set. Discuss.
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April 24, 2009
posted by Brad Tyer at 07:01 AM
Well this was bound to happen. All the recent hot air about secession has circled back to Chuck Norris and his November 2008 book Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America (sorry, not sure how we managed to miss reviewing that one). Flogging it on the talk-show circuit, Norris told Fox pundit Glenn Beck, “We could break off from the union if we wanted to ... I may run for president of Texas.
“If not me,” Norris later wrote in his own commentary on WorldNetDaily, “someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.”
Whatever that means. We’re sure he explains it in his book. Which we still don’t have time to read. We’re waiting for the movie.
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April 16, 2009
posted by Brad Tyer at 08:12 AM
Poet W.S. Merwin
If it’s April, it’s national poetry month, and if it’s national poetry month, the International Festival-Institute at Round Top is hosting its annual Poetry Festival (April 17-19; reservations required; call 979-249-3129). And what better way to detox from a numbers-filled tax week than by filling your mind with words?
This year’s featured poet célèbre is Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner W.S. Merwin, who lives on the Hawaiian island of Maui, translates Dante for fun, and has published more than 20 books of poems, including one of our favorites, “Unknown Bird,” which begins with seeming appropriateness to the occasion:
Out of the dry days
through the dusty leaves
far across the valley
those few notes never
heard here before
one fluted phrase
floating over its
wandering secret
all at once wells up
somewhere else
Early birds may want to know that Merwin will warm up for the weekend by reading his work as part of the Michener Center for Writers’ literary series at 7:30 p.m. tonight, Thursday, April 16, 2009, at UT-Austin’s Avaya Auditorium, ACES 2.302, on the corner of 24th and Speedway on campus.
But back at Round Top from Friday through Sunday, Merwin is just one of many stars on offer, including several with homes in the Observer firmament, including longtime Observer poetry editor Naomi Shihab Nye, Houston doctor/poet and Observer feature subject Fady Joudah, and Observer contributors Marian Haddad, Jenny Browne and Abe Louise Young.
For more info on the festival and reading schedules, check out the Institute at Round Top Website.
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April 14, 2009
posted by Brad Tyer at 11:10 AM
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the 1939 publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the novel most responsible for Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature — one of only 10 ever awarded to American writers, and surely the most widely read of that bunch — and the inspiration for working-man balladeers from Woody Guthrie to Bruce Springsteen.
If you went to high school in this country, you probably need no reminder of the novel’s migratory Dust Bowl plot, but if the coming depression has got you in the mood for a bit of cheering up, a rollicking dose of musical theater might be just the ticket. Happily enough, Austin’s Zach Scott Theater has the Tony-winning musical adaptation of the play (by Frank Galati of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre) up and running through May 10.
Fun fact to ponder while you wrap your head around the idea of a 4-piece band hanging off the fenders on that famous jalopy ride west: Theater namesake Zachary Scott’s first wife, Elaine Anderson, married John Steinbeck a week after her divorce from Scott was finalized.
Okay, promise, no more Steinbeck references for a while.
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April 10, 2009
posted by Brad Tyer at 09:55 AM
Love Stories in This Town
By Amanda Eyre Ward
Ballantine Books
205 pages, $14.00
There’s a nice long tradition surrounding the Texas-Montana axis in literature: it’s the route of the cattle trail in Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove; it’s a migration well familiar to hardscrabble-noir novelist James Crumley (born in South Texas; died last year in Missoula); and then there’s John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley (having married a woman from Texas, Steinbeck proceeds to fall in love with the state of Montana).
Novelist Amanda Eyre Ward graduated from the lauded MFA program at the University of Montana in Missoula and now lives in Austin, and at least one of the short stories in her new collection is set in Butte, Montana, where Ward’s narrator is a librarian. If she feels a bit stranded in that occupation, in that place, perhaps that’s because the historical copper-mining boomtown of Butte, once home to the “Richest Hill on Earth,” is now better known for a giant hole in the ground called the Berkeley Pit than for its dusty book depositories.
Not that Ward writes about environmental travesty. Not unless you count what the jacket copy refers to as her characters’ “fervent search to find a place where they truly belong.”
That search takes those characters to San Francisco and Savannah, Montana and Texas and elsewhere, but Pearland writer Emily DePrang, in a review to be published in the April 17 issue of the Observer, offers a slightly different read. The collection as a whole, DePrang says, “seems much more convincingly a study of loneliness.” From the review:
Loneliness sounds like a terrible theme for a book of short stories. Who wants to tongue the grooves of modern isolation? But Ward makes a subtle pleasure of the experience, like the resolution of a minor chord or a gently pressed bruise. Her language is simple—colors are blue and yellow, never cerulean or mustard—and careful. Her protagonist is a woman a little apart from the world, observant and sensitive.
Look for the forthcoming review, but if you just can’t wait, know that Ward will be reading from Love Stories in This Town during a champagne launch party at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 15, at BookPeople in Austin. Go make her feel at home.
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