Southern Bookman

Nathaniel Philbrick tells how George Washington orchestrated Yorktown victory, American independence

I spent Memorial Day morning completing Nathaniel Philbrick's "In The Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown."

Along with Washington's patience and leadership in keeping peace among different factions, I was struck by how big a role the French played in the U.S. gaining independence.

The French navy's control of the Chesapeake Bay after a victory over the British fleet ensured the American victory at Yorktown, where  the French army's siege tactics led to British Gen. Cornwallis' surrender.

Philbrick, who also wrote a readable account of the early days of the Revolution in Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill, shows that Washington often was dependent on French leaders such as  Admiral de Grasse. Washington marshaled the highest diplomatic skills to persuade French leaders to support American aims.

Sometimes, they resisted, as when DeGrasse refused to send French ships up the York River, which might have allowed Cornwallis' forces to escape. A sudden storm dashed Cornwallis' plans.

Washington initially resisted moving his army to Virginia to bottle up Cornwallis. At first, he planned to attack British-held New York, a strategy that Philbrick struggles to justify.

Philbrick exposes Washington's repellent actions in regard to slavery. Several of Washington's slaves escaped, and apparently joined Cornwallis's army along with hundreds of other slaves. During the Yorktown siege, with food running low, Cornwallis expelled the slaves, many of whom starved or fell victim to disease.

After the battle, Washington attempted to recapture his slaves, hiring a professional slave hunter, according to Philbrick. After a peace agreement with the British had been signed,  ending the war,Washington sought to prevent thousands of former slaves from leaving New York with British forces. The British insisted on the slaves retaining their freedom and traveling to Britain.

Washington in his later years did criticize slavery, and in his will freed his slaves, upon the death of his wife, Martha. But during his lifetime, he sought to uphold slavery at his home of Mount Vernon. Washington also resisted a venture by Lafayette to establish a farming venture that would operate without slavery.

The American commander agreed to aide John Laurens' proposal to establish black regiments in the Continental Army. I was astonished that Washington commanded the most integrated American army until Vietnam.

Yet, Philbrick notes that Washington's efforts to recapture slaves after Yorktown sowed the seeds of the Civil War.

Philbrick's book is part of a renewed interest in the Revolutionary War in recent years, fueled by the success of the musical "Hamilton" and popular biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and other Founding Fathers.

While the Revolutionary War receives new attention, interest in the Civil War was waned, according to an article Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal's Cameron McWhirter. Visitation to Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg and Chickamauga has declined, McWhirter reported.

One reason is the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, and the violence at Charlottesville over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, McWhirter found.

Another cause is a declining knowledge of American history among young people. When I was growing up, Civil War interest was high among Southern males. Now, aging Civil War re-enactors are not being replaced by younger participants, McWhirter found.

Books on the Revolutionary War reveal that it was a nasty conflict,  a civil war between the rebels and American British loyalists. Philbrick relates brutal British tactics such as throwing small-pox-stricken slaves into wells to poison drinking water. As another recent book details, the fighting continued for two years after Yorktown in a bitter civil war in the Carolinas.

Now, noted World War II historian Rick Atkinson has turned to the Revolutionary War. Atkinson's recently released "The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777:" is the first of a three-volume history of the war, following his trilogy about the allied victory over Germany in World War II.

The most striking scene in Philbrick's book is Washington bidding farewell to his officers in New York City. As Philbrick relates, Washington stood for a strong central government while refusing efforts to make him an American king.  Our current president tramples Washington's legacy.

 

Las Vegas recevies renown as literary town

Not only is Las Vegas booming from the Supreme Court legalizing sports betting in our land of the free. Along with landing an NHL hockey team and the Oakland Raiders, the glitzy desert mecca is now a hot spot for literature.

The gambling and entertainment town associated with Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, Howard Hughes and the Mafia now hosts a high-toned literary festival and supports a bookstore known as the Writers' Block, according to an article in The New York Times Monday by John Williams, who also writes some of the newspaper's best book reviews.

Why shouldn't Vegas be a literary town? The glitzy desert mecca is more than the strip. It's the home of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, no longer a national basketball power, but possessing a fine writing program.

Art critic Dave Hickey, author of the well-praised collection "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy," once taught at UNLV.

Las Vegas has been the site of a number of memorable movies, most prominently "The Godfather: Part II." Unless you prefer "Viva Las Vegas," and who doesn't like Elvis and Ann-Margret?

The city also received literary and cinema notoriety from Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

As far as art goes, some even like Las Vegas' iconic sign.

Believer magazine, the literary and pop-culture journal that for some reason I've never warmed to, now publishes from Las Vegas, according to Williams. The publication was losing money until a Vegas-based foundation gave it a money infusion.

Good to know that reading is a bigger pastime in Vegas than slot machines. I wouldn't place money on it though.

 

 

Farewell, Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly, who died April 11 at age 79 of multiple myeloma, enriched my literary life. One of America's foremost poets and a noted Keats biographer, Plumly was a distinguished creative writing professor at the University of Maryland.

Early in his career, Plumly was my favorite professor at LSU,  transforming his English literature class into great performance. I believe that was the then rising young poet's first academic job.

A native of rural Ohio like James Wright, Plumly also turned a brutal childhood into enduring poetry. With his full beard, frequent laughter and deep voice, Plumly loved playing the role of the two-fisted poet with surprising wells of sensitivity. As he aged, his beard turned from the black I remember to snowy white.

Plumly's interpretation of James Joyce's "The Dubliners" left me with a lifelong love for the short stories, especially "The Dead," which I reread every January. After all of these years, I still remember Plumly's comments about Joyce's art.

As he advanced his career, I eagerly read Plumly's work in literary magazines and whenever he published a new collection. 

Then Plumly enjoyed late success as a Keats biographer. Following brilliant poems on Keats' life, Plumly wrote "Posthumous Keats," a collection of linked biographical essays. As a longtime lover of Keats, I was enthralled by Plumly's examination of the Romantic poet's career and posthumous fame after his death at age 25, believing that he would be forgotten.

"Posthumous Keats," along with Jackson Bates' definitive biography, are my favorite books on Keats. My passion for Keats was also awakened at LSU, thanks to an older professor, an immaculately dressed Englishwoman in whose class I was the only student.

Plumly's account in "Posthumous Keats" of the doomed young poet's horrendous carriage ride from Naples to Rome under the care of his loyal friend Joseph Severn is a literary masterpiece. Keats also made the brutal journey with a young woman suffering from an even worse case of tuberculosis than his. Severn's calm and the suffering and physical humiliations suffered by Keats and the young woman are rendered with black humor, pathos and compassion.

A subsequent book on Keats' attending a dinner in 1817 at the home of the artist Robert Benjamin Haydon along with William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb was not as compelling. But Plumly still captured the lifestyle and artistic culture of early 19th century London.

Plumly's death is the latest of an author whose work I constantly followed, joining John Updike, Philip Roth and others. Plumly leaves his wonderful poems, his brilliant books on Keats and the memory of a young poet awakening a callow college student to the riches of literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good Friday, 2019, Heading Westward

On a stormy good Friday morning in Atlanta, I read John Donne's "Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward," as has been my custom for many years.

Wonderful to reopen the Norton Anthology of English Literature and rediscover Britain's literary treasures.

We're headed westward ourselves for a mini-family reunion and history-steeped weekend in Montgomery, Ala.

Other family members are on their way to Fort Worth to cheer the LSU gymnastics team on as they seek a national championship.

As we depart, here is an Easter message from George Hebert's "Easter Wings."

O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

Elizabeth Kolbert investigates disappearance of Louisiana's coast

Louisiana loses a staggering amount of land to the Gulf of Mexico each hour. The disappearance of the state's coast is one of the world's most alarming environmental disasters.

Elizabeth Kolbert in a pessimistic article in the current New Yorker finds that control of the Mississippi River is the main cause of the state's rapid land loss.

Flood control and the need to keep the Mississippi from abandoning New Orleans and Baton Rouge mean that the river no longer spreads sediment to build up the state's delta, as it did for thousands of years. The oil industry's cutting of canals through swamps and marshland worsened the crisis.

Kolbert reports on likely futile attempts to counter the land loss through engineering efforts to artificially boost sediment in places like Plaquemines Parish, where seawater now covers large areas where homes and businesses once stood.

Along with Kolbert's reporting, two maps shock with the realization that much of southern Louisiana is gone forever, and that New Orleans, already sinking, will be threatened by the gulf in not too many years. One map shows the old familiar boot-shaped Louisiana. The other shows the state today, with shredded slivers of land remaining in places like Plaquemines and Terrebonne Parish.

Kolbert's Louisiana reporting updates that done by legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, who in a 1987 article examined control of the Mississippi. In homage to McPhee, Kolbert visits a central focus of his writing, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Old River Control Structure 80 miles north of Baton Rouge.

The corps keeps 70 percent of the Mississippi's water flowing toward New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As Kolbert details, following McPhee, the Mississippi, seeking a shorter distance to the gulf, wants to shift west into the Atchafalya River's channel. If the Mississippi made its break, Louisiana's two major ports would be left dry.

While two engineering projects are under way to restore land in Plaquemines, the states' relentless loss of land won't stop unless river control is ended. New Orleans' economy would be devastated, but the city already seems doomed to sink into the sea.

Kolbert stands among the most pessimistic environmental writers, seeing human's alteration of nature as irreversible. She takes a broad view, citing the term "global change," rather than just changes in the climate.

With overpopulation, humans now outstrip the body weight of other vertebrates combined, she says. Along with rising species extinctions, she cites threats from humans' dominance of the globe: atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication (the spread of chemicals to waterways, causing algae blooms, etc.). "These are just some of the byproducts of our species' success," she says.

So much for the joys of baseball's opening day.

While GOP loons like Sen. Mike Lee mock the Green New Deal with claims such as that it would remove airplanes, that's the kind of decisive action needed if humans are to escape the worst of "global change." We might not be able to afford air transportation any longer.

Alas, Kolbert takes a dark view of humanity's prospects.

"At this point, it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us - nearly eight billion - and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable."

Impracticable or nor, it's time for massive action.

 

 

Christian Lorentzen takes temperature of book reviewing in "age of algorithm"

Literary critic Christian Lorentzen in a long article in Harper's magazine diagnoses the decline of book reviewing in the United States.

Lorentzen's "The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm" cites a dismaying personal example: He's lost his contract to write book reviews for New York magazine.

That's sad news for admirers of the magazine, whose longtime editor Adam Moss recently left. While New York is expanding book coverage, Lorentzen claims that he was told that book reviews no longer serve the magazine's editorial purpose.

Instead, the magazine has moved to author-friendly profiles and Q and A features, such as an interview with Irish author Sally Rooney on the magazine's web site in which she gushes about her favorite books. With Lorentzen gone, the magazine apparently will avoid a serious review of Rooney's new novel, "Normal People."

"The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm" indicts a similar philosophy at The New York Times, whose Sunday Book Review is a weekly debacle. Lorentzen slams the Times Book Review as anti-intellectual, citing its feel-good features such as "By the Book," in which celebrities and authors chatter about their favorite books and answer such trivial questions as which famous writers they would invite to a dinner party. As Lorentzen points out, the feature often serves as a publicity vehicle for a new book by the subject.

The Times' brief book reviews also lack intellectual depth, mostly handing out fulsome praise and lacking sustained analysis. While the newspaper's daily reviewers give books more in-depth consideration, with analysis of weaknesses, they too write with an overall rosy tone. I never thought I'd miss Michiko Kakutani's critic-speak, but at least she was unafraid of skewering an author's work.

Lorentzen's piece is a 21st century echo of Elizabeth Hardwick's 1950s diatribe in Harper's that found the same shortcomings in book reviews of the time. Harper's reprints Hardwick's fusilade, which served as the manifesto for the New York Review of Books, which she co-founded in the early 1960s.

While the Times book review is now mainly a publicity vehicle for publishers, serious reviews remain in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic and the London Review of Books, where I first encountered Lorentzen's work. I expect his reviews to continue in the LRB and elsewhere.

Unmentioned by Lorentzen is one of the best book review sections to have appeared in recent years, The Wall Street Journal's Saturday Review section. While WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch is often blasted for journalistic horrors such as Fox News, he has broadened the WSJ's cultural landsape. The Saturday WSJ gives the thoughtful, analytical and balanced reviews that the Times Sunday Review lacks. Under Murdoch, the Times Literary Supplement has sustained its quality.

On a hopeful local note, I have noticed a small resurgence in Sunday book reviews at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC no longer employs a staff book critic as in the past, but the newspaper's freelance and wire reviews give attention to books often neglected by the national media. Unlike the Times, the AJC's reviewers plumb deeply into a book's strengths and weaknesses.

Lorentzen ties the decline of book reviewing, if it really exists, to the rise of television as a serious cultural force. Book lovers will enjoy his puncturing of the overinflated reputation of "The Sopranos" and other so-called "peak TV" shows.

The book review demise is also linked to the frequently pronounced death of the novel. Such panic-laced post mortems are often given by novelists themselves, such as the late Philip Roth, who seemed to connect the novel's critical condition to his retirement.

While studies show a decline in reading, sure to burgeon as video streaming eats up more and more leisure times, books keep appearing, and finding readers.

 

 

 

 

 

New York Times looks at school board-Exxon battle in Baton Rouge

The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board upset the Red Stick's business leaders recently by denying a $2.9 million property tax break to the Exxon/Mobil refinery, the Louisiana capital city's biggest employer.

An article by New York Times business reporter Richard Fausset Tuesday gave an adequate spot-news summary of the controversy without examining deeper issues of public education, racism and class differences in the Mississippi River town where I grew up.

Fausett says that an executive order by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards allowed local governments to oppose tax breaks to businesses, previously controlled by an obscure state agency. The state body had regularly approved the Exxon/Mobil tax break, but after Edwards' order, the financially strapped school board rejected the perk.

While Faussett describes Baton Rouge as "business friendly," the city and Louisiana consistently rank low for attracting new businesses. The byzantine tax system set up by Huey P. Long in the 1930s still discourages businesses from coming into the state, according to a recent column by the Baton Rouge Advocate's Larry Keller.

For years, Long-legacy taxes on big oil eased property owners' tax burden. When local homeowners saw their assessments rise in the 1960s, anti-tax fervor led to severe restrictions on local government revenues. Fausett reports that the school board faces a $30 million budget shortfall, partially a result of property owners' hostility to taxes. 

Former Gov. Bobby Jindal gave huge tax breaks to businesses, nearly bankrupting the state and sapping funding for Louisiana State University and other schools. In recent years, Baton Rouge has received new businesses, with innovative LSU programs generating a small but vibrant surge in startups.

Among the issues Fausset doesn't examine is what the school board-Exxon dispute reveals about Baton Rouge's long neglect of public schools and the underlying racial and class conflicts.

Soaring unhappiness with the city and parish school system has brought a campaign by affluent white neighborhoods to break away and form their own city. While Exxon and other petrochemical plants are located on the poverty-stricken northside, the rebellious white areas are on the prosperous southside, insulated from the pollution-spewing plants.

When I was a child, public education received universal support from white neighborhoods. When the school system began long delayed integration in the late 1960s, many white residents turned away from the public schools. For years, a federal judge ran the city and parish school system, ordering a much-hated busing system. Adding to the long-established Catholic school system, private schools sprung up.

Exxon and the other petrochemical plants made Baton Rouge a stronger union town than most Southern cities. When I was growing up, Baton Rouge's boom or bust economy was periodically disrupted by violent strikes. To counter the AFL-CIO's power, businesses formed the Public Affairs Research Council, which issued reports and exerted influence on the state legislature. Superceding race, those class conflicts still roil the community.

In the last decade or so, Baton Rouge has built a more diverse economy. As Keller reported in his column, downtown Baton Rouge now has more than 1,000 hotel rooms, and the long desolate downtown now draws conventions and visitors with good museums, theaters, nightclubs, music venues, restaurants and tourist attractions.

But while downtown and the Southside thrive, the northside remains blighted. Once stable white blue-collar neighborhoods have deteriorated, and the city's murder rate has reached a crisis point.

As Faussett reported, the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups blasted the school board's action as "radical." The school board and supporters said it was long past time for the wealthy corporation to pay its fair share.

The controversy will pass away, but Baton Rouge will remain divided on public education, race and class.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Russell Baker

Russell Baker in his newspaper memoir "The Good Times" remembers walking through London to cover Queen Elizabeth's coronation, wearing a top hat and tails and carrying his lunch in a paper bag.

Baker, who died Monday at age 93 after a fall at his home in Leesburg, Va., knew the full range of human experience. Through his New York Times column and classic memoirs, Baker chronicled the American century. While he wrote numerous books, his daily newspaper columns define his career. He began "The Observer" in 1962 in a bountiful era of New York newspapers and ended it in 1998 at the dawn of the Internet.

Growing up in rural Virginia during the Depression, Baker never lost his sense of boyhood wonder. A master of American language - he joked that his short sentences, in contrast to The Times' orotund style, made him a humorist - he also displayed a classical elegance. He was a natural American aristocrat.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his column and another Pulitzer in 1993 for his autobiography "Growing Up," in which he vividly recalled his boyhood during the Depression in rural Virginia. In "The Good Times," he joyfully remembered his career as a young reporter, especially his days as the London correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, an experience unimaginable these days.

After leaving the Times, like Joe DiMaggio saying farewell at the top of his game, Baker enjoyed a second career as the host of "Masterpiece Theater" on public television. He also wrote incisive literary criticism for The New York Review of Books and carried out other projects, including a libretto.

He never lost his pride that he could write fast. He was a newspaper man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Former Times Editor Jill Abramson looks at media's fractured new world

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson's "Merchants of Truth"  is breaking out as the hottest new book of the year.

An examination of how Internet technology has disrupted the news media, "Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts" delves into her experience at The New York Times.

The book also looks at Amazon owner Jeff Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post and the rise of Internet news sites BuzzFeed and Vice.

Along with her Times recollections, Abramson did original reporting for the book.

"Merchants of Truth" has generated a burst of attention and controversy in New York media circles.

The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner conducted an interview with Abramson for the magazine's web site, and competitor New York magazine is publishing an excerpt before the book's Feb. 5 publication date.

Abramson tells Chotiner that she was fired as The Times' first female executive editor because of her abrasive management style and her opposition to efforts undermining traditional boundaries between the newspaper's business and news operations. Since leaving the Times, Abramson has taught at Harvard and written a column for the Guardian.

In the Chotiner interview, Abramson also questions the Trump obsession by the Times, the Post, CNN and MSNBC. She alludes to negativity in Times coverage of Trump, although she then backs away from that claim.

While pointing out that the Times web site recently had posted nine Trump stories, she also concedes that Trump coverage receives high readership and has boosted online subscriptions.

Her criticism of the Times for firing copy editors and her advocacy of media truth clash with her own controversy over incorrect reporting. The publication of Abramson's own book on media disruptions shows the negative effects of media disruption.

Arielle Duhaine-Ross, a Vice reporter Abramson interviewed, criticized the author several mistakes. The worst was that Abramson falsely called Duhaine-Ross a trans woman, when she identifies herself as a "queer, non-gender conforming woman," according to an Out story. Abramson said the mistakes were in an early galley proof, and have been corrected for the book.

Another objection was Abramson's claim that Duhaine-Ross was hired because of her appearance and that she has little expertise in the environmental field. Duhaine-Ross pointed out that she has a major in environmental reporting. Abramson's assertion apparently remains in the book.

Abramson also erred in reporting that Duhaine-Ross gave insufficient coverage of Donald Trump pulling out of the  Paris global climate change agreement. Duhaine-Ross apparently did substantial reporting on the decision.

A second reporter disputed Abramson's claim that he failed to wear a haz-mat suit at an African clinic while covering the Ebola crisis. The reporter said he followed the same protocol as other reporters and that the protective clothing wasn't required outside of a high-risk area.

An article posted on Literary Hub blamed the mistakes on  publisher Simon-Schuster, like the Times, cutting back on its fact-checking operation. Abramson told Chotiner that the book has been thoroughly fact-checked.

New Republic writer Josephine Livingstone in a review said that the book's section on Abramson's firing at The New York Times is essential for understanding how digitial technology is shaking traditional media companies. But Livingstone blasts the Vice and Buzzfeed sections as showing a severe misunderstanding of the shifting media landscape.

Despite Abramson's missteps, "Merchants of Truth" will be an essential book for old Times watchers and media junkies such as myself.

I respect Dean Bacquet, Abramson's successor at the Times. But firing Abramson after her valiant defense of traditional journalistic values was a low point for the newspaper.

Despite the disturbing mistakes showing a misunderstanding of new media and the rising generation's gender issues, Abramson remains a stalwart defender of factual reporting and commitment to the truth. Her book will make a significant contribution to upholding those values.

 

 

 

200 years ago this spring, John Keats was touched by God

This year marks the 200th anniversary of John Keats' astonishing creative breakthrough in 1819.

In the spring of that year, Keats wrote "Ode to Indolence,""Ode to Melancholy,"  "Ode to Psyche,"  "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale." 

That brilliant outburst followed  "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." The creative streak, among the greatest in English literature, began in the fall of 1818 with his uncompleted epic, "Hyperion: A Fragment."

In the fall of 1819, he capped his poetic run with what some consider the most perfect poem in the language, "To Autumn."

That ended Keats' career, except for the haunting poem to his love Fanny Brawne, "This Living Hand," written at the close of the year. Stricken by tuberculosis, and mentally beset by financial worries and his obsessioin with Brawne, Keats gave up poetry, the youthful renunciation as irrevocable and shocking as Rimbaud's.

In a desperate attempt to cure his tuberculosis, Keats traveled with his friend Joseph Severn to Italy. Keats died in Rome at age 25 in a small apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery.

Keats and his poems have been a touchstone for me since I discovered his life and work in college. Each year, I reread  "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn." I've never considered the other odes on the same level, although I recently reread "Ode to Melancholy," which has some of the most beautiful lines in poetry.

Fairly obscure at the time of his death - he requested that the epithet "here lies one whose name was writ on water" be engraved on his tombstone - Keats is now considered the greatest poet of his era, his best poems rivaling Shakespeare's in their lyric mastery.

Keats' poetic outburst and tragic life influenced William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abandoned their youthful poetry to write their deeply meditated novels.

Standing at Wentworth Place, Keats' home near Hampstead Heath where he wrote his 1819 poems, I could sense his presence. That outpouring of words and images came to him over a few months, then ceased. In the London spring 200 years ago, he wrote poems that have transcended time.