Biographies “Perfect timing for Ayn Rand biographies - Concord Monitor” plus 4 more |
- Perfect timing for Ayn Rand biographies - Concord Monitor
- BOOK REVIEW: Elvis pal Klein takes readers inside King's court - Star-Press
- In My Library: Mario Cantone - New York Post
- The Wellspring of American Creativity - CBS News
- Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies - Rutland Herald
| Perfect timing for Ayn Rand biographies - Concord Monitor Posted: 09 Jan 2010 10:20 PM PST You can admit it now: Maybe in your teens, or in college, you experimented. Hiding in your dorm or your parents' basement, you took hit after hit. Your friends began wondering why you'd changed, but it was too late: Ayn Rand was in your bloodstream. My own dealer was a libertarian teaching assistant who introduced me to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in graduate school; soon I was subscribing to Rand-inspired newsletters and quoting Howard Roark and John Galt - Rand's two most famous creations - on the virtues of selfishness and individualism. It took the better part of a year to get over it, but, like so many others, I eventually realized that architects shouldn't go around blowing up buildings and that, above all, you can't really divide all humans into capitalist geniuses and collectivist looters. Now, two new beautifully timed Ayn Rand biographies - appearing just as the financial crisis and Obamanomics have sparked interest in her defense of pure capitalism - offer ammunition for fans and skeptics alike. As Jennifer Burns explains in Goddess of the Market, critics of Rand's one-dimensional characters and overwrought prose miss her underlying political impact. "For over half a century," writes Burns, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to a life on the right," a one-woman awakening for burgeoning conservatives. Yet while Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made agrees that Rand has helped shape views on individual rights for three generations of Americans, both books end up revealing how hard it is to live out Rand's worldview - a difficulty exemplified most painfully by the ultimate devotee: Rand herself. In a life spanning most of the 20th century, Rand sought to live up to her own fictional characters, falling deeper into that world she made and farther from reality. The result was a sad existence, rife with the personal and intellectual contradictions she detested in others. She prized reason above all else yet was notoriously emotional; she claimed to live for no one's approval but agonized over every last critic; she lionized free markets but never invested in stocks; she praised independent thinkers yet demanded mindless loyalty from friends and associates. Not even Rand, it turns out, could be her own true believer. Rand's literary themes and worldview emerged early in life. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, she was a "lonely, alienated child," oppressed by a mother who constantly questioned her worth - much as Rand would later do to her own acolytes. An academic standout but friendless in school, Alisa saw herself as "a heroine unfairly punished for what was best in her," says Burns, a recurring theme in her fiction. She admired her father's refusal to continue working after the Red Guard confiscated his pharmacy during the Bolshevik revolution. His actions inspired her major work, Atlas Shrugged, in which capitalists decline to keep producing rather than allow the state to pillage their productivity. Rand was enamored of all things American - especially movies, which she watched by the hundreds - and migrated to the United States at age 20, made her way to Hollywood and began working on short fiction and plays. There she met and married Frank O'Connor, a middling actor who was "stunningly beautiful . . . tall, slender, with a classic profile." He helped her acquire U.S. citizenship, encouraged her in the darkest days of her writing, and inspired the look of her male protagonists. Yet he would never live up to their heroism. O'Connor emerges as one of the gloomiest individuals in these biographies, retreating into gardening, painting and alcohol to escape Rand's suffocating presence. As her reputation grew with the 1943 publication of The Fountainhead - the best-selling tale of a hunky young architect who would rather destroy his creation than forsake his independence - Rand acquired a growing collection of fans, taking a particular liking to admiring and handsome young men. Foremost among these was Nathaniel Branden, who first reached out to her as a Fountainhead-obsessed college student. Though 25 years her junior, Branden became the most pivotal relationship in her life. He was her intellectual heir, popularizer and lover. "You are my lifeline to reality," Rand told Branden as she slipped into depression and paranoia after Atlas Shrugged received harsh reviews. "Without you, I would not know how to exist in this world." (Her long reliance on amphetamines to power her through marathon writing sessions didn't help her mood, either.) And she even felt pressured by her novel's hero: "John Galt wouldn't feel this," she mused aloud in her New York City home. "I would hate for him to see me like this." One way she got by was through infamous Saturday night salons, all-night affairs attended by Branden, his wife and a small group of her most dedicated followers (including a young Alan Greenspan, whom Rand nicknamed "the Undertaker.") In these gatherings, held throughout the 1950s and '60s in Rand's New York City home, Rand would hold court on her philosophy - now dubbed Objectivism - and pass judgment on the actions of "the Collective," as the participants called themselves. The moniker, intended ironically, ended up oddly apropos. Acceptance of Rand's entire worldview was a requirement for admission; even deviating from her tastes in art and fashion became verboten. "Check your premises!" Rand would exhort her followers. "In all of her most crucial relationships, Rand would see others favorably largely to the degree that they mirrored her unusual self," Heller explained. The result was a steady stream of friendships gone wrong; whenever Rand decided that someone displayed "anti-life" tendencies, she cast them out. Years later, after a wrenching break with Branden, she privately wished him decades of impotence for daring to start another affair. Crossing Rand was not just bad manners; in her book, it was a moral failing. While Heller's biography is the more comprehensive of the two - detailing everything from the books Rand loved as a child to her fumbling affair with Branden - Burns, a historian at the University of Virginia, emphasizes Rand's impact on American conservatism. Though her Russian roots forever informed her politics, Rand's U.S. political awakening flowed from her revulsion against Roosevelt's New Deal. She became a volunteer for Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie in 1940, even conducting opposition research on FDR and blasting the president on New York City street corners. "What she wanted, more than anything else," writes Burns, "was someone who would stand up and argue for the traditional American way of life as she understood it: individualism." But no person or movement ever measured up. Right-wing icons such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were not sufficiently conservative, the libertarian movement was simply stealing her ideas, and not even free-market economist Friedrich Hayek was good enough. ("The man is an ass, with no conception of a free society at all," she scribbled in the margins of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.) In the end, up until her death in 1982, it seemed the only one who ever measured up in her mind was, well, Rand herself. Branden later described to Heller the principles he taught to Objectivism students in the 1960s. Among them: "Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. . . . No one who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue can be a fully consistent individual." In a made-up world, it was easy to believe it. "It was more and more true that we were living inside the world of Atlas Shrugged," Branden admitted. He should have checked his premises.
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| BOOK REVIEW: Elvis pal Klein takes readers inside King's court - Star-Press Posted: 10 Jan 2010 04:46 AM PST Elvis: My Best Man (Crown, 320 pages, $25), by George Klein: Elvis Presley is one of the most enduring figures in American pop culture history. Hundreds of thousands of people still pay each year to see Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn., and fork over cash for his music and memorabilia. And he consistently places at or near the top of the annual list of highest-earning dead celebrities. Not bad for a guy who died in 1977. He's known around the world simply as Elvis, and his life story has been told and retold in every imaginable medium, from documentaries and movies to biographies and memoirs. And they keep rolling in. The latest comes from George Klein, who befriended Presley when they were high school classmates. Klein went on to earn a place in the King's inner circle of friends and employees known as the Memphis Mafia. Elvis: My Best Man isn't a tell-all. Klein makes it clear in the author's note that he "was offered a fair amount" to write such a book after Presley's death. Instead, what he offers is an insider's view of Presley the man as opposed to Presley the singer, actor and icon. "So much has been written and said about Elvis Presley that for a long time I didn't feel the need to add my own book to the clamor," Klein writes. "Now, though, I'm old enough to know that I won't always be around to speak of the Elvis I knew." The book features retellings of Presley's interactions with other famous figures of the era -- from Ann-Margret and Steve McQueen to Nat King Cole and James Brown. Elvis: My Best Man also hits on the major points in Presley's life, including his marriage to -- and divorce from -- Priscilla Beaulieu; his time in the Army; his movie and music careers and so on. Klein unlocks the door to the King's court, but what he shows us isn't a tale of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll favored by other Presley biographers. His is a tribute and a welcome addition to the mountain of Presley books already on the market. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| In My Library: Mario Cantone - New York Post Posted: 10 Jan 2010 03:35 AM PST Mario Cantone does many things, but he won't Kindle. "That thing makes me scared — it could come alive and suck you right into the ether!" says the "Sex in the City" star, who's also a standup (comedian) guy. "I like to hold a book," he tells The Post's Barbara Hoffman. "When someone sends me a script, I ask for a hard copy or print one out." Many of the books he buys are biographies — particularly those by Charlotte Chandler, whose Groucho Marx and Federico Fellini bios he adores. They're light years away from the stuff he and others will recite from tomorrow at "Celebrity Autobiography," an off-Broadway production at The Triad Theater, in which he'll be reading from Zsa Zsa Gabor's life story (which he hasn't read ahead of time so it "sounds fresh.") Here's what's in Cantone's library. Very Valentine "She writes for a lot of women, but it's more than girly stuff — she writes about Italian-Americans. There's not a lot of people who do that, and she does it really well. This novel is about a woman whose family has had a shoe-making business for years . . . it's very Italian, very New York, very fashion." Schulz and Peanuts "I grew up with Peanuts. [Cartoonist Charles] Schulz was such an interesting guy — not the happiest man, and I think the family was upset that he spoke to his biographer about that. There are [comic] strips between chapters. It's great." Duma Key "I worship him. Isn't it interesting that in the last 10 years of his life, he's getting stellar reviews, which he couldn't buy earlier in his career? This one's about a guy who had a horrible accident in which he lost an arm. He goes to the Florida Keys and starts to paint in this house other artists stayed at. [Only] he starts painting the future . . . It's very suspenseful and beautifully written." American Prince "No matter how big you get in this business, you never feel you get your due. There's a lot of regret in this book, but there's funny s - - - too, especially about Shelley Winters, who [Curtis] couldn't stand. This is a great autobiography, and it sounds just like him." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| The Wellspring of American Creativity - CBS News Posted: 10 Jan 2010 06:12 AM PST Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| 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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