One City, One Book: Your mom’s book club edition Sunday, Oct 14 2007 

Bay Area and Biography and History and Novels RC 6:26 pm

This whole book club phenomenon is interesting. On the one hand, I feel like Oprah’s Book Club has greatly improved the quality of books you can find at the airport or a bad book store and has gotten me out of many a tight spot, like receptionist jobs where I would finish my book by lunchtime and be faced with an entire afternoon of playing solitaire.

Also, I love the lists of questions they have started putting at the end of these books, such as: “Elisabeth called all her descendents to her bedside when she knew she was dying. What were the long-term repercussions of this act for her family?” This brings back fond memories for me of the Great Books program in my elementary school, whose point I never really understood but was a great way to get out of class and spend the afternoon windbagging about some silly Ray Bradbury story.

On the other hand, I think maybe it leads to books that are better understood as  conversation starters for your afternoon scrapbooking session than as, I don’t know, books. Take Cane River. Written by “a former vice president of Sun Microsystems to immerse herself in family history” via a UC Berkeley Extension writing class (rad!), this book traces the author’s family origins from slavery in Creole Louisiana to relative prosperity in 1930s Louisiana.

You can tell it is meticulously researched, and she found great records, from a written family history to tons of court records to a series of newspaper articles about the murder of someone in the family. I would be much more interested in reading about that process from a first-person perspective than in the awkward narrative she constructs from it. I think that this might, however, have been a marketing decision, based on the many, many book clubs (including Oprah and One City One Book) that probably prefer the novel format.

Personally, I think that slapping a treacly narrative on top of Tadeny’s meticulous research robs this story of its inherently good qualities. And as one alumnus of the UC Berkeley Extension to another, I have a tiny word of advice for you: Sentences like “The day was cold and foggy, like his spirits” should be avoided, if possible. For more information, I recommend the the Extension’s copy editing certification series of classes.

 

Mistress or bureaucrat? Madame de Pompadour Sunday, Aug 26 2007 

Biography RC 1:08 am

My love affair* with the Mitford ladies continues with Nancy’s biography of Madame du Pompadour, Louis XV’s favorite mistress.

This book is pretty good. It is like spending a long, boozy afternoon with your friend who has just finished an exhaustive research project and is just telling you the juiciest anecdotes from her research. She lets you know who all the fun people were, who was boring and/or priggish (the Queen, the Dauphin, some guy named Prince de Croy who sends hilariously detailed memoranda to everyone, including the Versailles gardener).

I suspect that Miss Mitford is one of those people whose summary of a party is way more fun than the party itself. That said, I trust her research methods. Even though it doesn’t have law review-style footnotes at the end of each sentence, the bibliography shows you which sources are quoted in each chapter. She also clearly visited every site and surviving artwork that the book discusses, and will tell you which of them have been spoiled and by whom (Germans or New Money, generally).

I was impressed, as my title indicates, by the bureaucratic nature of being a royal mistress in 1750s France. Apparently, everyone married at like 12 and they all had lots of mistresses (and misters, or whatever the term is). Madame du Pompadour was Louis XV’s fourth interesting mistress (the first three were a set of sisters! Scandalous!). She was sort of the mistress in chief, installed with a role in the court and official recognition and various sort of diplomatic duties — no running around in secret; it was like being a member of the cabinet or something. And then, esp. as she got older and because, as Miss Mitford observes, “[s]he was not strong enough for continual lovemaking and it exhausted her,” there were various lesser mistresses in mistress middle management, and then below them these young prostitutes the King would just sleep with once and send on their way. The French are funny. I recommend this book.

*Actually, this has a lot to do with my queue management issues at booksfree.com. I keep forgetting to cancel my membership and they keep forgetting to cancel it for me, even though they have an expired credit card. So books show up and I read them. But for some reason they only send me Mitford-related books. Perhaps it is some bug in their software. At least they do not send me books that are not on my list.

 

The Enchanting Mitford Girls and their weird biographers Monday, Jul 30 2007 

Biography and History RC 4:24 am

I think I mentioned my Mitford binge from earlier this year. I bought this book that contained both Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and the Pursuit of Love — so good! I read them a million times.

She is a little like Evelyn Waugh, with whom she was apparently good friends, also a little like a very rich aristocratic Dorothy Parker. Then I read Jessica Mitford’s book of letters (surely as long as Bleak House but finished in one greedy gulp) that came out earlier this year, which was also excellent and fascinating, and a source of funny anecdotes about the Bay Area in the 1950s onward.

I was at the library earlier and saw this book, “The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family” by Mary S. Lovell, whose cover looks almost exactly like Love in a Cold Climate so I had to read it. The book is fastidiously researched, but deeply weird. She will have five sentences in a row that are carefully sourced like, “She dated so-and-so for five years. She always made him roast beef for dinner on Thursdays,” each one carefully footnoted to a letter or interview, but always followed by something totally from left field like “but it’s unlikely that they ever had sex” or “I don’t think she knew Hitler was a Nazi” (two of the girls ended up as these sort of Hitler acolytes) with no attribution whatsoever. Very weird.

Also, the authoress seems to have fallen under the sway of the fascist sister Diana, so there are long sections about how beautiful Diana is to this day, how fascism is not so bad, and in the creepiest bit of all, something about how Oswald Mosley (which, by the way, seems like a great name for a Jackie Collins character) was not particularly racist or anti-Semitic; he just had an agenda of in favor of European unification and against “non-European immigration” into Europe.

In sum, a very creepy little book, but the pictures are good. Also, I recommend Nancy and Jessica’s books and correspondence.

 

Jesse James, so far Sunday, Mar 4 2007 

Biography and Pop sociology RC 12:47 am

Law school totally ruined me for the type of biography where they say: “On that foggy morning, Caesar woke up in a tizzy because he had a nightmare that he never told anybody about,” with no attribution and no way they could possibly could have obtained that insight.  I tried to read one of the chief’s pop history tomes after my first year of law school and almost clawed out my eyes screaming about the lack of citations.  Therefore, I appreciate the heavily annotated nature of this biography, which has a footnote at the end of every sentence just like a law review article.  The thesis of this book is that Jesse James was not the fun-loving Robin Hood character of western movies, but rather a psychopathic pro-slavery terrorist.  (The author makes a point of using the word “terrorist” every few sentences, in case we did not get it the first time.)

I have always been sort of interested in the connection between pulpy novels, the mythology of the western, and the civil war — perhaps because my atrocious education is limited to what I have learned from spaghetti westerns, Ken Burns documentaries, and children’s books.   Also, like Trane, I am descended from Missourians so it is interesting to read about Missouri history and the role of Missouri in the civil war.

So far, I have two criticisms.  First, there are not nearly enough pictures!  Wasn’t Jesse James a celebrity during his lifetime?  And yet they can only come up with two pictures of him, and there is only one Wanted poster?  Ridiculous.  I also get a little bored of the tactical war discussions, but I understand that this type of thing is very alluring to the civil war re-enactors, who outnumber me.

I have learned lots of good slang, like “bushwacker” and “redleg.”  I am starting to feel vaguely guilty about liking southern bourbon so much because it seems like the drug of choice for bushwackers.  And did you know there used to be a political faction called the “Know-nothings?”  So refreshingly honest.  Did you know Lawrence, Kansas was founded by abolitionists and was a crazy hotbed of social liberalism (redleggism, in other words)?  I have learned all of this, and Jesse James is only about 18.  Will keep you posted.