Biographies “Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies - Rutland Herald” plus 3 more |
- Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies - Rutland Herald
- Three biographies offer a fresh look at a few legends of rock ’n ... - Buffalo News
- Baby, Let’s Play House’ - Biloxi Sun Herald
- Elvis couldn't help... falling in love with young women, says ... - Courier-Journal
| Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies - Rutland Herald Posted: 03 Jan 2010 05:09 AM PST Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies
By MARK BUSHNELL - Published: January 3, 2010 If you pick up one of Robert Buckeye's new biographies of important Vermonters, chances are you'll never have heard of the subject. Buckeye wants it that way. "These people should be better known," he says. And, reading through these essay-length books, it is easy to agree. In his chapbooks, Buckeye, a retired archivist for Middlebury College, offers insights into such little-known Vermonters as Martin Freeman, Edwin James, Viola White, Samuel Dwight and Francis Frost. They are not part of the pantheon of important Vermonters — Ethan Allen, George Aiken, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, etc. — but their absence makes their stories no less significant. Take Edwin James. James was a fascinating person who was ahead of his time, which might explain why he has been lost to time. Born in Weybridge in 1797, James graduated from Middlebury College. He was a learned young man, with knowledge far beyond his years. By the time he is 23, he has studied botany, geology and medicine. Tellingly, while at Middlebury, he reads about the voyages of Capt. James Cook and Don Quixote, notes Buckeye. The books encapsulate his future — part adventure, part tilting at windmills. James gains an appointment to Maj. Stephen Long's expedition to the Rocky Mountains, the first major exploration since Lewis and Clark's. He becomes the first white man to climb Pike's Peak, which is initially identified on maps as James Peak. He discovers and names hundreds of plant species, including mountain blue columbine, which will become Colorado's state flower. To James, however, the West is not a nirvana to explore. He is horrified by what he sees there: White men slaughtering buffaloes by the thousands and keeping only their tongues. But he is most appalled by the treatment of Native Americans. He sees how false treaties, Christianity and alcohol are being used to push tribes off their land. In 1827, he helps write a book to expose the atrocities being committed in the name of progress, but few people listen. James is a century too early. In his essay, Buckeye has brought back James, who was in serious need of resurrecting. Buckeye uncovered about 200 citations about him in 19th-century journals and newspapers. "I don't think there are more than three or four in the 20th century," he says in an interview, "but I think he is a significant American." 'Not Vermontiana' Buckeye's brief books — they are only about a dozen pages long — fall somewhere between works of popular history and scholarly fare, though they tend toward the academic end of that spectrum. "I was aware when I began this series that they might be difficult to interest people in because in some sense they are not Vermontiana," says Buckeye, whose Amandla Publishing company produces this Quarry Books Series. "They are more intellectual and scholarly than Vermontiana." On the other hand, they are not long, scholarly works, so academics might be turned off. "In each case I wanted to do a responsible job," Buckeye says, "but I wasn't going to be a lifelong scholar on any of them." Buckeye's foray into publishing is a second, or perhaps third or fourth, career for him. From 1971 to 2003, he worked for Middlebury College, serving in a variety of positions, including college archivist, special collections librarian, and curator of and instructor in American literature. Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the subjects of his books have ties to Middlebury. Buckeye plans to write 10 such books and sell them through local bookstores. Yale, Middlebury and the University of Vermont have subscribed to the series. These are not encyclopedic works that tell every known fact about a historic figure and do so in a chronological order. Instead, these are free-ranging essays in which Buckeye teases out themes in the subjects' lives and lets facts rise to the surface as needed to make his points. The essays are poetic at times. Not surprisingly, Buckeye modeled his books after the book "In the American Grain" by William Carlos Williams. Better known as a poet, Williams picked subjects who represented his vision of what it meant to be an American. Similarly, Buckeye chose subjects who embodied a certain "Vermontness." Buckeye was a contributor to the Vermont Encyclopedia, which came out in 2003. One of his guidelines in picking subjects for these books was that they had to be obscure enough to have been excluded from that book. All but two of his subjects passed that test. "But," Buckeye says, "I wanted to include Martin Freeman (whose encyclopedia entry he wrote), and my take on Joseph Battell was one that no one had taken." Battell is probably the best-known subject in Buckeye's series. He was a quirky land baron in Addison County who gave away his vast holdings, including the top of Camel's Hump, on condition that they be preserved. Most writing about Battell looks at his environmental ethic. Buckeye looks at another aspect of Battell's urge to conserve things. "He was the first Take Back Vermonter," Buckeye says of Battell, who lived from 1839 to 1915. Wading through Battell's rambling and "unreadable" tome, "Ellen, or Whisperings of an Old Pine," Buckeye found Battell rejecting the waves of modernity that were then hitting Vermont. He sees the rise of science, particularly Darwinism, as threatening the supremacy of religion. He also rails against other forces that he sees threatening the way of life he knows, particularly trains and automobiles, which bring the outside world streaming into Vermont. A free man Though Martin Freeman appears in the Vermont Encyclopedia, he is hardly a household name. The grandson of a slave who gained his freedom by fighting in the Revolution, Freeman was born in Rutland in 1826. He grows up with opportunities that few blacks of the era experienced. The minister at his church, the East Parish Congregational Church, recognizes his potential and supports his admission to Middlebury. The college's president, an abolitionist, loans Freeman money for tuition and books. He is selected the salutatorian by his graduating class and gives an address in both Latin and English, as is the custom of the time. He gains an appointment at the Allegheny Institute near Pittsburgh as professor of mathematics and science, and eventually becomes the college's president. Freeman becomes involved in the slavery issue. He argues that blacks shouldn't try to pass as whites by straightening their hair. "Let the man of whatever hue, respect himself, and be true to the instincts of his manhood," he writes. Freeman eventually despairs of the United States ever getting over its ingrained racism. He resigns his college presidency and joins the faculty of Liberia College in Liberia, a country founded with the purpose of providing a home for freed American slaves. Though the work is hard, Freeman declares: "I have never been happy until I made Liberia my home." A unusual woman Viola White found no such home. Heeding her inner compass, White follows a path rarely followed by women during the early 1900s. She is an intellectual, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley in 1911. She becomes a socialist and pacifist and travels to Europe to work as a nurse during the Great War. After the war, she writes poems and is identified as a promising younger poet in a Yale publication. Her poems denounce capitalism, religion and war. She works at the Brooklyn Public Library but can't stand the city, where the language of daily life is "vulgar and impoverished, and this extends to every subject howsoever great, even love and death." The great love of her life is another woman, whom Buckeye identifies simply as Beatrice. Their love, he notes, is "bound by middle-class norms of respectability" and is a romantic friendship rather than a sexual relationship. Beatrice leaves and in her sorrow, White writes a 57-sonnet cycle to her lost love. White leaves Brooklyn for Vermont, taking a position in 1933 at Middlebury, curating the college's American literature collection. The next year she earns her doctorate, having completed her dissertation on novelist Herman Melville. For the sake of the job, which she needs to help her parents in New York City, White doesn't talk about politics. She starts taking long walks in the wilds of her new community and writes two nature books about her experiences: "Not Faster Than a Walk" and "Vermont Diary." She is devoted to the work of Thoreau and obtains for the college his own copy of "Walden," with his handwritten notes inside. She acquires more of Thoreau's books, many of which were in his cabin on Walden Pond. Viola White chooses a quiet life among the books and flowers of Middlebury. Like the others in the Quarry Books Series, it is a life that might have gone unnoticed if Robert Buckeye hadn't illuminated it. (The Quarry Books Series is available at Book King in Rutland, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury and Northshire Bookstore in Manchester.) Mark Bushnell's column on Vermont history is a weekly feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine. A collection of his columns was recently published in the book "It Happened in Vermont." He can be reached at vermontpastlane@gmail.com.
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| Three biographies offer a fresh look at a few legends of rock ’n ... - Buffalo News Posted: 03 Jan 2010 04:12 AM PST Share this story: What could possibly be left to write about Paul McCartney, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin? Isn't enough, enough already? As it turns out, no. Every rock writer worth his or her salt wants to tackle the big subjects. And if big subjects are your interest, well, let's face it –McCartney, Bowie, and Plant&Page are more likely to whet your journalistic appetite than, say, Fall Out Boy or Lady Gaga. So the final weeks of 2009 and the first days of the new decade find major critical/biographical works on these rock critic war horses hitting the shelves. The bad news is, consistent fascination with the past suggests slim pickings in the present. The good news is, all three of these biographical theses have something new to offer to the mountains of similar pages already published and still available. Time, ideally, provides the opportunity for broader contextualization. McCartney, Bowie and Zeppelin all emerged in the 1960s, and though all of them continue to make new, meaningful, and in some cases, cutting edge music in the present tense, enough calendar pages have been ripped off and discarded to provide the rock scribe a chance to discern forest from trees. Apparently, that opportunity doesn't need to be offered twice. The breadth of detailed accounting, new sources and apparent enthusiasm for the subjects themselves represented by these three new books is impressive. Yes, these stories have been told before. But, like the art of songwriting itself, the best rock biographies enrich a tale in the retelling, and bring their own artistry to bear on tradition. If you're a fan of McCartney, Bowie or Led Zeppelin, these new books are most welcome additions to the existing scholarship. If you aren't, they offer an open window into still exciting and invigorating artistic worlds. Paul McCartney:A Life, By Peter Ames Carlin, Touchstone, 384 pages ($26) Telling Paul McCartney's story is, by this point, a tough gig. Even people who never cared about the Beatles, and skipped everything Macca has done since, are likely aware of the broad details of the man's life. Making all of this fresh is the biographer's cross to bear, and happily, Peter Ames Carlin –author of the excellent Brian Wilson/ Beach Boys study "Catch a Wave" –is up to the task. Carlin writes with a sure hand, and favors a crisp prose that moves lithely across several decades of subject matter. Clearly, he cares about McCartney's music deeply, but just as clearly, "A Life" is not a piece of drooling fandom. Though the Beatle years have been covered more than sufficiently in the past, McCartney's solo work has never really been given a fair critical shake. Carlin wisely seeks to fill in the gaps, and his new sources and insights on the body of post-Fabs McCartney work –which spans 40 years, compared with the Beatles' barely 10 –suggest an authoritative critique. The book's real gift to McCartney scholarship, though, is its subtle attempt to counter the ingrained and rarely challenged notion that Paul was the cute, shallow Beatle in contrast to John Lennon's tortured-artist-with-rapier-wit street cred. Carlin paints McCartney as an intelligent, ambitious, driven and ceaselessly creative artist, and gently suggests that –as with Lennon, who also lost his mother at a tender age –music became for Mc- Cartney a means of channeling grief and despair and overcoming issues of loss and abandonment. Carlin is the first author of a serious McCartney critique to suggest that making music is Mc- Cartney's only consistent joy –family aside –in a life that has had its share of tragedy. He's also the New books explore the creative contributions of rock legends Paul McCartney, left, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin, represented here by Jimmy Page. first to place all of McCartney's work in a continuum. When viewed through Carlin's lens, it's easy to place later-period masterpieces like "Memory Al-most Full" and "Electric Arguments" in their proper context –as further developments of themes begun "way back when they were Fab." Bowie:A Biography, By Marc Spitz, Crown, 448 pages ($26.99) Two constellations beam brightly in the David Bowie biography cosmos –David Buckley's "Strange Fascination" and Dave Thompson's "Hallo Spaceboy: The Rebirth of David Bowie" are both beautifully written and authoritatively detailed. This can't have made author and journalist Marc Spitz's life any easier, though "Bowie:A Biography" was not his first rodeo –Spitz has strong books on Green Day and Los Angeles punk to his credit, and a resume that includes scribblings for the likes of the New York Times, Spin, Blender and Uncut. At heart, though, Spitz is a "Bowie kid" grown up. Being a lifelong fan of one's subject can be the kiss of death for the rock biographer, since objectivity is routinely kicked to the curb in such scenarios. For Spitz, though, being a Bowie freak gives him startling insight. Bowie has changed rock music as often as Miles Davis changed jazz, and it must be said that only those who've paid close attention to every phase of the man's storied career can claim the authority to interpret all the work. Spitz is a wonderful writer –sharp, focused, fair and witty. "Bowie" collects all the facts, boasts fresh, current interviews with everyone but the Thin White Duke himself –since his 2004 surgery to correct a blocked artery, the man is not talking much to anyone, save via his periodic posts on Bowie.net –and intersperses first-person remembrances that place the reader directly inside Spitz-the- Bowie-kid's mind. All of the albums are dealt with evenly, which is nice when it comes to the period in the Bowie canon beginning in the early '90s and continuing straight through his most recent effort, "Reality" –records which Spitz rightly posits as among Bowie's best work. Remarkably, by cutting through the abundant rumor and conjecture surrounding Bowie-the-myth, Spitz has added keen perspective to Bowie scholarship. When Giants Walked the Earth:A Biography of Led Zeppelin, By Mick Wall; Orion, 512 pages($27.99) The story of Led Zeppelin is already written – what one needs to do is simply get it down, straight and accurately, and one has assembled a compelling book. The British quartet is the most important rock band of the '70s, and represents several things at once –the way the American blues could be transformed into a new, arena-filling thunder; the manner in which Middle Eastern influences could be married to Celtic folk to serve a sound at once powerful and subtle; and the full-on debauched, decadent "rock god" glory that surrounded the band, when its members wanted as much (most of the time) and even when they didn't. British journalist Mick Wall has his Zeppelin affairs in order, and seems intent on offering a fair perspective on the band's history and eventual undoing. He takes liberties with stream-of-consciousness passages, wherein an omniscient narrator speaks directly to Messrs. Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham, but when accepted as intended, these bits add to the rich fabric of the tome. Until Page and/or Plant tell the Zeppelin story themselves, "When Giants Walked the Earth" is likely to stand as the authoritative text on the band. Jeff Miers is The News' pop music critic.  Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Baby, Let’s Play House’ - Biloxi Sun Herald Posted: 03 Jan 2010 03:22 AM PST '+'>'); } --> 'Baby, Let's Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him'; By Alanna Nash; Illustrated. 684 pages. It Books. $27.99. Friday will be the 75th anniversary of the birth of Elvis Presley. Don't fear this milestone will be celebrated too quietly. Elvis 75 (shorthand for the event itself, as well as the title of a new greatest-hits collection) will bring an onslaught of commemorative festivities and products, such as parties at Graceland, concerts with Elvis impersonators and a movie suggesting Presley, who died Aug. 16, 1977, has spent the last three decades in space. It will bring everything except realistic thoughts of what the uncontrollably self-destructive Elvis might have been like as a 75-year-old man. Naturally, there are books. Lots of books. Among the standouts — beyond a tell-all by the doctor who knows a lot about Presley's death and a hagiography from the lifelong buddy who is fond of saying America has had many presidents but only one King — is Alanna Nash's long look at Elvis' bizarre history with women. She has cleverly borrowed one of his most seductive song titles, "Baby, Let's Play House." As Nash's book is studiously annotated and longer than many biographies of American presidents, there is reason to think she may have done some serious work here. Also, she approaches this subject with a running start. As the author of "The Colonel," about the carny tricks of Presley's famously Machiavellian manager, Col. Tom Parker, and "Elvis and the Memphis Mafia," she sounds like someone well connected in the Presley world. So it is only a little worrisome to see her identified in the jacket copy for her new book as "the first journalist to see Elvis Presley in his casket." That whiff of morbid curiosity turns out to be determinative. So does the genesis of "Baby, Let's Play House": Nash acknowledges she initially wrote a women-oriented article for Ladies' Home Journal and then decided to expand it. Thus armed with what she all-too-aptly calls "an oral history of some of the women in Elvis's life," Nash began padding her story with three kinds of material: her own legitimate interviews (some with women still pining for Elvis 50 years after their fateful encounters), secondhand gossip (from self-serving memoirs and fan publications) and psychobabble. Cobbled together, these elements led her along Presley's long, winding trail from babes to baby sitters as his life spiraled into sad decline. Showing: Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Elvis couldn't help... falling in love with young women, says ... - Courier-Journal Posted: 03 Jan 2010 04:55 AM PST (2 of 2) As a result, Presley became emotionally stuck around age 14, when most boys begin to assert their independence, but he remained a momma's boy who was also locked in a cycle of perpetual grief for his brother. Meanwhile, he was becoming arguably the biggest star in human history, a circumstance that allowed him to freely indulge in his emotional turmoil — especially after his mother died at 46, when Elvis was 23. "Her death was a double death. He had not been able to separate himself from either his twin or his mother and he lost them both that day," Nash said, and the "trauma colors everything. He had this heightened need for physical contact. Oftentimes, he wasn't having sex with these women, but he needed to be with a woman. He needed the tactile touch and comfort ... That was a surprise. "I was really shocked at how many 14-year-old girls there were. Fourteen was the magic number, and not in a salacious way, like 'Lolita.' He didn't see himself as being much older than that and so he was comfortable with a 14-year-old girl. Because he could be himself around her, or he felt as if he were ... taking care of her, much as he might have done with his twin," Nash continued. "That really was a surprise and an eye-opener to me, and I think that it's terribly poignant." On the surface, much of "Baby, Let's Play House" sounds titillating, especially the many times that Presley courted 14-year-old girls well into his 20s. Gladys would screen the girls, making sure they fit her son's profile, and befriended many of them. (Presley's fame almost always squelched any reservations the girls' parents may have had.) The majority of girls also looked alarmingly similar, a combination of a young Gladys and, presumably, how Elvis imagined Jessie might look. "I think there's going to be a really strong reaction to this book one way or another; I think people are going to be very divided by it," Nash said. "Especially as the book progresses and his behavior gets weirder and weirder, it requires some thinking on the reader's part to try and put these patterns together. The thing I'm trying to do here is explain why he was the way he was, and why it was, to some degree, part of his artistry. I never try to judge him, but as he gets odder and odder, I think some people are going to have a hard time with it." She worries that the book may draw too much attention for its unavoidable sexual content. "I think that would be a shame, and that's not what the book is about. It really isn't, so I'm asking people to read from the beginning and not just skip around," Nash said, laughing. "I see it as a very serious study of an extremely complex man who defined much of the world that we live in. "Sex is everywhere, and to think back to the time when the way he moved on stage was so shocking — it seems kind of silly now how upset people got. He paid a price for that boldness, and I wanted this book to be as bold as he was, and some people aren't going to like that." Reporter Jeffrey Lee Puckett can be reached at (502) 582-4160. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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