Southern Bookman

Farewell, Don Sutton

Don Sutton was the voice of lazy summertime afternoons in Atlanta.

Broadcasting Braves games on the radio, the 324-game winner and Hall of Fame pitcher spoke with authority about his craft. Like legendary baseball announcers from the past, the Alabama native also seemed like a member of the family or a trusted old friend.

Mostly remembered as a gritty, indomitable starter for the Los Angeles Dodgers, the longtime Braves broadcaster died Monday night of cancer at his home in California at age 75. He also pitched for the Astros, Brewers, Athletics and Angels, getting hitters out with guile and guts more than overpowering fastballs.

While he never pitched for the Braves, Sutton became a team icon as a broadcaster. He joined the beloved team of Ernie Johnson Sr., Skip Caray and Pete Van Wieren, who narrated the Braves' rise from their forlorn days on Ted Turner's Channel 17 to their glory years as the National League's top franchise. Sutton was the last surviving member of the team.

In a Fox Sports corporate shakeup, Sutton was banished from TV to radio, where he found his true metier. He was a throwback to the old-time radio voices who brought baseball into American homes before the television era. In contrast to football and basketball, baseball is a radio game. Along with imparting baseball lessons, Sutton painted vivid pictures of a game's action.

From his 23-year career as a pitching craftsman, Sutton drew upon a deep knowledge of baseball culture, how the players experienced the long season, the intricacies of the game, the drama of each inning.

As the AJC's Mark Bradley said in a tribute Wednesday, listeners always learned something from Sutton. The old Dodger also gave them baseball poetry.

 

 

Joe Biden begins a new American chapter

After all of these years, I most remember the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

Our class at Glasgow Elementary School in Baton Rouge, La., watched the event on television, hearing our new leader with his Boston accent herald the rise of a new generation with the stirring words, "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Kennedy was 43 years old, taking over from the aged Republican Dwight Eisenhower.  Our new president, Joe Biden, is 78, a member of a generation that has been in power in Washington for three decades.

Yet, after the devastation of the Trump years, today feels like a new beginning for the country.

Kamala Harris, our new vice president, sets a historic legacy and holds the standard for a new America.

Biden has announced an ambitious agenda to tackle problems neglected during years of stalemate.

The times are daunting, with the country torn by political turmoil and losing thousands a day to the Covid epidemic. 

After many years of joy and sorrow, Joe Biden's hour has come. Like Kennedy, he's uplifted by his Irish heritage and Catholic faith. As on that bitterly cold day in 1961, the nation begins a new chapter.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" enters public domain

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is blossoming with new editions following the expiration of the classic novel's copyright on Jan. 1.

Along with the numerous republications of the work published in 1925 - along with Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" - author Michael Farris Smith has published "Nick," a prequel exploring the life of narrator Nick Carraway before he moved next door to the eponymous Jay Gatsby's Long Island mansion.

"The Great Gatsby" details Gatsby's quixotic and tragic effort to win the love of the entitled Daisy Buchanan through an invented past and fraudulently obtained wealth. Carraway observes Gatsby's rise and fall, with witty and pointed commentary about Gatsby's lavish life and the other characters. He comes to see Gatsby as a heroic tragic hero, and Daisy and her repellent husband Tom as soul-less, materialistic monsters.

The novel's entering the public domain has also fostered reappraisals, including a recent piece by New York Times literary critic Parul Sehgal that questions whether the novel is really that great. Like other writers of his era, Fitzgerald has been criticized over his negative depictions of women and anti-semitic characterizations.

Similar to J.D. Salinger's "A Catcher in the Rye," Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is praised for its distinctive first-person voice, rather than the complexity of its characters and plot.

A commercial failure when first published although praised by T.S. Eliot as a major advance in American fiction,  "The Great Gatsby" can be read in one sitting. Fitzgerald's language, filtered through Carraway's observations, has a poetic precision in which every word matters.

The story of Gatsby's doomed love for Daisy Buchanan skewers the excesses of American capitalism in the "Roaring '20s," before the stock market crash that ushered in the Depression. Many of the passages, including the famous ending about "the dark fields of the republic," live on in the cultural memory.

New York Times critic Wesley Morris in an introduction to one of the new editions says rereading the book gave him a fresh appreciation of Fitzgerald's understanding of how Americans constantly reinvent themselves.

But I don't believe I'll return to "The Great Gatsby." The book glows in my memory, Fitzgerald's words forever bright.

 

 

 

U.S. remains divided over Martin Luther King's dream

On Martin Luther King's holiday, I think about the contrast between his March on Washington and the recent mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

On that sweltering day in August 1963, King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech to 250,000 mostly black citizens gathered on the National Mall before the Lincoln Memorial.

The nonviolent "march for jobs and freedom" sought equal rights for the country's black citizens. King's vision of racial unity and economic opportunity inspired landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation.

Violence and conflict during the 1960s gave the counterpoint to King's message.

John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas months after King's eloquent appeal. Lyndon Johnson, the champion of civil rights legislation, saw his presidency destroyed by his escalation of the Vietnam War.

After expanding his message to oppose the war, King was killed by a right-wing assassin in 1968. Soon after, Robert Kennedy was murdered. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago disintegrated into rioting, leading to the election of Richard Nixon.

On Jan. 6, of this year Trump in a crude divergence from King's speech exhorted his followers gathered in Washington to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification of Joe Biden's election as president.

Answering Trump's incitement to violence, the white supremacist mob invaded the capitol, threatening the lives of Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and members of Congress. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, were killed.

As Trump slinks away, impeached for a second time, he leaves Washington an armed camp for Biden's inauguration. Presidential inaugurations through the years have celebrated the country's open democratic society and peaceful transfer of power.

This week's presence of troops recalls Lincoln's first inauguration on the cusp of the Civil War. A century after the war's end, and the abolition of slavery, King called for the country to fulfill the promise of full citizenship for black citizens.

Trump and the GOP have sought to cripple the racial progress King inspired. After the destructive Trump years, Biden promises to restore America's commitment to justice and equality.

The Jan. 6 violence and presence of armed troops in the nation's capital expose a vast chasm in fulfilling King's dream.

Robert Caro donates extensive archive to New York Historical Society.

Robert Caro's archive will inspire future scholars and history lovers.

The New York Historical Society announced earlier this month the acquisition of Caro's interviews, research materials, notes and writing drafts.

Caro's files for his massive biographies of  New York City public works director Robert Moses and Sen. and President Lyndon Johnson will be open to researchers without restrictions, as stipulated by the 85-year-old Caro, the Historical Society said.

The writer's book on Moses, who transformed New York City and surrounding areas with his massive 20th century construction projects, examines New York history from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Covering Johnson’s origins in rural Texas and his long political career, the multi-volume biography gives an expansive account of American and world history over the same era.

A former investigative reporter for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, the New York City native in his monumental books traces the dynamic eras of World War I, the Jazz Age, the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Caro's won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Ducuments also will be displayed in a permanent installation, "Robert Caro Working," that will feature rotating materials "allowing practitioners and lovers of history and biography to observe the writer and his craft," according to the Historical Society.

The installation will feature recordings of Caro speaking about his research methods, along with TV appearances.

The collection includes the extensive interviews Caro has conducted. For his biography of Moses, "The Power Broker," Caro carried out more than 500 interviews, including many with the the last people then alive who had known New York Gov. Al Smith and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

He also conducted a multitude of interviews for his Lyndon Johnson biography, of which four volumes have been published.

Along with extensive rewriting, Caro is known for his immersive research methods, such as moving to Johnson's Austin, Texas, for an extended period.

For work on his forthcoming final volume of the Johnson biography, which covers Johnson's presidency, Caro and his wife, Ina, who works with him, moved for a time to Vietnam.

Caro's devotion to old-fashioned writing methods will also be honored. The archives include his outlines, the legal pads on which he's written the first versions of his work, the succeeding drafts hammered out on Smith Corona electric typewriters and galleys of his books, including comments scribbled by his well-known editor, Robert Gottlieb.

"The Power Broker" is receiving a new burst of fame during the Covid-19 pandemic as one of the books often viewed on bookshelves of reporters and analysts when they do TV Zoom interviews from home. Volumes of Caro's Johnson biography are also frequently visible.

Caro said he chose the New York Historical Society as the permanent home of his memoirs because of his warm memories of spending hours there as a child. When his mother was seriously ill, a favorite aunt often took him to the historical society, he said.

As Caro enshrines his legacy, his readers hope that the exhibit eventually will mark the completion of his Lyndon Johnson biography. After detailing Johnson's rise to the leadership of the U.S. Senate, vice presidency and presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the final volume will encompass Johnson's tragic demise.

After the passage of landmark civil rights legislation, Johnson's presidency collapsed over his escalation of the Vietnam War. In striking contrast to Donald Trump's refusal to accept Joe Biden's election as president, Johnson gave up the presidency when his support eroded.

The Caro exhibit will honor historical truth, which Trump and his followers have attacked.

 

 

 

Media acclaim greets new Sally Rooney novel arriving in September

The novel still lives: News that Sally Rooney will publish a new book is drawing widespread media coverage.

Rooney's third novel, "Beautiful World, Where Are You" comes out in September, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and Faber & Faber in Great Britain and Rooney's native Ireland.

At age 30, Rooney is one of the few novelists who still receive such attention in the social media age. Rooney gained enormous popularity among a coterie of fans with her first books, "Conversations With Friends" and "Normal People," which examined the erotic confusions and cultural aspirations of young people coming of age in a socially changing Ireland and Europe. 

She also received acclaim for a steamy Hulu series based on "Normal People," which told of a young Irish couple's troubled love affair.

While some U.S. critics have given Rooney's work tepid praise, she has been acclaimed internationally as "the voice of her generation." She is one of the few "literary" novelists who command a wide readership.

Previews of the new novel indicate it will cover much of the same ground as her previous books. That's not a detriment; Faulkner, Fitzgerald and others revisited the same territory throughout their careers.

Set in Dublin, "Beautiful World, Where Are You" will portray Alice, a novelist, her best friend, Eileen, and their love interests, Felix and Simon. The young adults seek meaning from their lives in a world of declining prospects and increasing environmental devastation.

While upholding the continued relevance of novels, the new book reflects the decline of letter writing. Much of the novel's plot consists of emails between Alice and Eileen instead of the ink-and-paper letters that once carried narratives. Rooney also used emails and text messages in her other novels.

But book lovers can rejoice: Rooney once again shows that novels still matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mimi Swartz takes aim at Ted Cruz

I'm always glad when Mimi Swartz publishes an essay from Texas on The New York Times op-ed page.

Swartz, a Houston resident and executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, writes mini-essays that touch upon personal experience to illuminate the state's curious blend of urban sophistication and anti-intellectual conservatism.

In a Times op-ed piece Tuesday, Swartz slams the despicable Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for advancing his political career by cynically appealing to the Republican Party's most primitive elements. Swartz emphasizes that Cruz's effort to attract Donald Trump's extremist followers clashes with Cruz's Ivy League education. "A thug in a sharp suit with an Ivy League degree is still a thug," Swartz concluded.

Along with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who also boasts of an elitist education, Cruz led Senate opposition to Joe Biden's certification as president. Their support of Trump's false claims of fraudulent voting led to last week's mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

Hawley in a notorious photo is shown raising his fist in support of the Trump supporters as they gathered to attack the Capitol while Congress was in session to accept Biden's electoral college victory.

After the riot, the Houston Chronicle called for Cruz to resign, and an effort is gaining force to remove him and Hawley from the Senate.

With their prestigious educations and analytical abilities, Hawley and Cruz might have formulated the philosophical basis for a new, more progressive Republican Party.

Instead, they seek political power by pandering to the party's reactionary, violent forces of racism and white supremacy.

 

AJC correspondent Tia Mitchell's heroic reporting in wake of Capitol riot

Applause for AJC Washington correspondent Tia Mitchell, who braved the Trump mob's invasion of the U.S. Capitol last week and carried out her mission.

Mitchell and other Capitol journalists were endangered in their own workplace by an attack like those associated with totalitarian countries. She and several colleagues gave The New York Times first-person accounts of their ordeal. The Sunday article revealed courage under fire in performing their First Amendment duties.

Along with several colleagues, Mitchell was covering the debate over certifying Joe Biden's election as president when the vandals broke into the Capitol corridors and attempted to enter the House chamber. As Mitchell told the Times, she was reporting on Georgia's House Republican delegation protesting the state's electoral votes going to Biden. As the threat worsened, she was given a gas mask, and taken to a safe location.

After the looters were at last cleared and Congress resumed its debate late Wednesday night, Mitchell returned to report on Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler's speech announcing that she would change course and not oppose Biden's certification, turning against an effort led by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Defeated the day before by Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock, Loeffler told the Senate that she made the choice because of the riot.

Mitchell, who had begun work the morning before, stayed until Biden's confirmation was completed early Thursday morning. Members of Georgia's Republican House delegation continued to support Trump even after the riot.

In an aside in the Times article, Mitchell mentions seeing Loeffler on the Senate subway as both left the Capitol after the long, stressful day. Even then, Mitchell sought to interview Loeffler, who understandably had nothing more to say.

Mitchell when she began work Wednesday morning didn't realize she'd have to display a war correspondent's valor in the U.S. Capitol. Despite the personal threat, she gave AJC readers essential news about what will be remembered as a dark day in U.S. history.

 

Farewell, Neil Sheehan

Neil Sheehan stood tall among reporters revered in newsrooms across the nation.

Sheehan, who died Thursday at age 84 from Parkinson's disease complications, was one of the famous New York Times reporters whom young idealistic journalists sought to emulate.

Best known for initiating the Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Sheehan won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his epic account of the Vietnam War, "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam."

Sheehan received the Pentagon Papers, a massive U.S. government report on America's escalation of the Vietnam War through the years, from Daniel Ellsberg, a government analyst who had illegally copied the document.

As a Times article accompanying Sheehan's obituary in the Times Thursday discloses, Sheehan himself used subterfuge and deception to duplicate Ellsberg's copy of the report.

Fearful of governmental prosecution, Ellsberg forbade Sheehan from copying the report, allowing him to read it. But he gave Sheehan the key to his apartment in Cambridge, Mass., and Sheehan took the report and copied it when Ellsberg left on a trip. The Times article tells a harrowing story of Sheehan and his wife copying the report at neighborhood print shops, then transporting the pages to New York City, buying an airplane seat for the several suitcases needed.

After the Times began publishing the report, the Nixon administration went to court to stop the newspaper, citing national security. When a judge halted the Times' publication, the Washington Post began printing the document. The U.S. Supreme Court on June 30, 1971, ruled in favor of the newspapers, finding the government sought unconstitutional prior restraint of publication.

Sheehan took 15 years to complete "A Bright Shining Lie," which viewed the career of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann in Vietnam as the paradigm of America's disastrous involvement in the war. The book with its complex portrait of the U.S. military and Vietnamese society unveils the war's tragedy with the narrative power of a Homeric epic.

The understanding of Vietnam came from personal experience; Sheehan was one of the reporters whose slow disillusionment with the war led to critical articles and increasing public opposition. First reporting for United Press International, then the Times, Sheehan along with the Times' David Halberstam, the Associated Press' and Times' Malcolm Browne  and CBS' Morley Safer uncovered the U.S. military's deceptions.

Publication of the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post's unraveling of the Watergate scandal represented the high point of American newspapers' power.

Such a massive commitment of resources is hard to imagine today, even with the newspapers' revival from online subscriptions.

With the Internet and cable TV, the media environment is more fragmented today, although the Times and Post still hold immense power to set the national agenda. The Trump administration has attacked the media even more vociferously than Nixon's.

But young idealistic reporters still arrive to follow Sheehan's bright, shining example, whether they know it or not.

 

 

 

The Republic stands, after day of mayhem

In 1968, student radicals took over Columbia, Berkeley and other universities.

But, despite the ambitions of would-be revolutionaries like Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Vietnam War protesters never breached the U.S. Capitol. That was accomplished by members of Donald Trump's "law and order" party Wednesday as a shocked nation watched. The revolution was televised after all.

Following Donald Trump's exhortation, a group of his armed yahoo followers invaded the capitol with surprising ease, vandalizing the cathedral of American democracy and leaving four dead. The minimal opposition by the Capitol Police raised rumors of collusion.

The New Yorker's Masha Gessen pointed out that more arrests were made during protests of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court. And, women abortion protesters received harsher treatment for shouting from the Capitol gallery several years ago.

After the leering loons were at last cleared from the Capitol, the Congress returned Wednesday night to resume certifying Joe Biden's election as president. Despite billowing outrage against Trump, 121 representatives and six holdout senators voted to support the declining president's baseless claims of a rigged election.

Grabbing dubious mantles of courage, GOP worthies like Lindsey Graham turned away from their Trump sycophancy to support the constitutional process.

The most ludicrous moment came when freshly defeated Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler recanted her vow to support Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz's seditious scheme to protest state electoral college results.

Claiming to have rediscovered the conscience she'd abandoned during her scurrilous campaign against Democratic winner Raphael Warnock, Loeffler said that because of the Capitol incursion, she would reverse course on protesting Biden's Georgia victory. Loeffler looked shell-shocked at losing the election, despite spending millions of her own money and that of national GOP power brokers.

After long dreary hours of parliamentary maneuvering, the new day dawned on Joe Biden's confirmation as president.

With impeachment or 25th amendment action unlikely, despite swirling rumors of those possibilities, Trump has another two weeks to generate more mayhem.