Critics' choices for Christmas From the "Book of Nonsense" to the "Vegetarian Planet," the joys of "Hardboiled America" to "The Bridge on the Drina," our critics urge you to stuff your stockings with good books this Christmas
Fisher, James T
James T. Fisher James T. Fisher holds the Danforth Chair in Humanities at Saint Louis University. His most recent book is Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61 (University of...
...All across the country, new ways of thinking and newly constructed belief systems were being chosen systems that could possibly glue back millions of splintered lives...
...In Dreaming, speculating on the source of her family's unbroken legacy of suffering, the Irish-Catholic Carolyn See insists that "it doesn't have to do with a belief in God...
...The Inheritance provides richly detailed vignettes of ethnic politics in Baltimore (Maeby's ancestral home) as well as in New Rochelle and Crotonville, New York, the hometowns of Trotta and Carey...
...Gordon focuses primarily on such white Memphis musicians as Jim Dickinson, who grew up in the 1950s viewing the manic disc jockey Dewey Phil-lips's anarchic "Pop Shop" television program ("he'd play a country song, he'd play a rock song, he'd play a blues song") and playing the blues of Howl-in' Wolf and Muddy Waters in garage bands, thinking it was "Chicago music" until he learned that Wolf and Waters were actually expatriates from the nearby Delta...
...See joined the party, but literary ambition was the stimulant that propelled her from the working bo-hemian class "into something upper-middle or beyond...
...Dreaming treats the double-edged tendencies of postwar social mobility ("Getting high, going up, in this society") with disarming candor...
...Gordon's Memphis "has always been a place where cultures came together to have a wreck: black and white, rural and urban, poor and rich...
...Two lovely, successful daughters and a happy third marriage to an ex-drinker, later See remains "almost the only one around here who drinks anymore...
...Leslie Maeby, Tim Carey, and Frank Trotta, Jr., inherited a commitment to the urban political process, but by the time they met as students at the State University of New York's Albany campus in the mid-1970s, each was a confirmed Republican...
...While it may be a slight stretch for Gordon to liken the career of the extraordinarily gifted Chilton ("he's a cultural icon," explains another Memphis musician, "and gotten paid damn little...and gets very little recognition by the labels") to that of neglected blues giants such as Furry Lewis, It Came from Memphis is among the best of the many myth-driven studies of the blues legacy, because it shows how a genuine community practices reverence for tradition...
...Samuel G. Freedman's The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (Simon and Schuster, $27.50, 464 pp...
...the novelist and critic Carolyn See devotes a chapter to her family's brief involvement in 1977 with Leo Sunshine, a West Coast New Age guru and con-man last seen in New Delhi sporting a beautifully tailored white suit...
...Oh, the embarrassing Californianness of it all," See confesses, launching a pre-emptive strike against the conventional scorn for faddish spirituality...
...presents a more "sobering" tale of three East Coast ethnic Catholic families whose traditional loyalty to the New Deal coalition collapsed under the heavy burdens of race, crime, and suburban exile...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, Dickinson and a large cohort of Memphis artists and musicians adapted the uncompromisingly "poetic furor" of the blues to the doggedly independent recording businesses that dotted the urban landscape (unlike Nashville, Gordon argues, Memphis has never been a "company town"), as well as to the "happenings" and dream carnivals that made the city a central if largely unacknowledged hub of the national counterculture...
...She even supplies a more hopeful ending...
...Many of the best recent books about the seismic changes in American life over the past half-century take the form of community studies or family histories...
...Though See is more interested in the politics of drugs and alcohol than the fate of the Democratic party, her story, with all its wrinkles, is no less representative of postwar American experience than Freedman's...
...In her memoir Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America (University of California, $12.95, 343 pp...
...spans the same era as Dreaming and The Inheritance, but it explores the enduring claims of local tradition rather than the wages of mobility...
...See's alcoholic first husband also recovered nicely...
...The trio tirelessly served the party as professional operatives in state, local, and national elections throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though Trotta grew disillusioned with politics just as his inherited faith in Catholicism was being revived...
...An extravagant Americanness indeed pervades this haunting and incongruously good-humored account of a life that began in the mid-1930s in the Los Angeles household of a drunken newspaperman, who tended his wife's regular Sunday hangovers by treating her to "a scoop of vanilla ice cream basted with a couple of tablespoons of Hill and Hill Blend...
...The enigmatic Alex Chilton whose commercial-recording potential quickly deteriorated following his stunning debut as a sixteen-year-old growling vocals on "The Letter," a Memphis-produced number-one hit for the Box Tops in 1967 best exemplifies the local spirit...
...Freedman situates his family histories along the fault lines of the New Deal coalition, but for all the genuine empathy (an avowed liberal, Freedman has sought to "inhabit the conservative experience") he directs at his subjects, the result is a bit too reminiscent of earlier studies of liberalism's demise in ethnic America...
...America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61 (University of Massachusetts Press...
...her second apparently survived a devotion to LSD in the 1960s...
...It was just the embarrassing Americanness of it all: all those people struggling with the social explosion that drugs, drink, depression, demoralization, and divorce had been detonating for over a century, like a nationwide string of firecrackers...
...has now earned immortality as one of the most colorful holy terrors in the annals of American nonfiction...
...Today, Dickinson argues with much justification that "the Delta blues is going to be one of the most significant Western contributions to the twentieth-century...
...Robert Gordon's It Came from Memphis (Faber & Faber, $14.95, 303 pp...
...In fact, See quickly rejoinders, there were plenty of good reasons why millions turned from churches to a dizzying array of alternatives in that besotted decade...
...It is the document of it...
...See's father eventually recovered, after a fashion, while her mother (whose beloved older sister, See's Aunt Helen, invariably entreated guests: "Let's have a short snort...
...It Came from Memphis is a brilliant guide to a cultural history you won't learn by visiting Grace-land or even the retrofitted blues joints along present-day Beale Street...
...The music in Memphis is more than a soundtrack to these confrontations...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 21
