December 2007: 2001: A Space Odyssey

by Arthur C. Clarke

From Wikipedia: It was developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick's film version and published after the release of the film. The story is based in part on various short stories by Clarke, most notably "The Sentinel" (written in 1948 for a BBC competition but first published in 1951 under the title "Sentinel of Eternity").

Review by Lester del Rey
Copyright ©1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted in "The Year's Best Science Fiction No. 2" edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, by permission of the author and Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

Nobody slept at the New York press preview of 2001, but only because the raucous and silly noise from the sound track screamed painfully into our ears. Space was a tumult of din and the hero breathed in his spacesuit like a monstrous locomotive at 60 gasps a minute. It was the only evidence of excitement in the place. Almost half the audience had left by intermission, and most of us who stayed did so from curiosity and to complete our reviews.

The pictorial part was superb. The colour photography was generally excellent, and the special effects and technical tricks were the best ever done. Even the acting was unusually good. With all that, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke should have given us the superlative movie promised by a barrage of publicity. If they had put Clarke's Earthlight on the screen with equal genius, it would have been a great science-fiction movie. Unfortunately, they didn't. Instead they gave us dullness and confusion.

The whole affair dragged. Every trick had to be stretched interminably and then repeated over and over again. Nothing was explained or given coherent flow, but everything was run on to boredom. Further cutting might help; surely it couldn't hurt.

The story staggers through four vaguely related episodes. First we get the theme of man's humanoid ancestors being given intelligence by an alien slab only to become murderers. Next we go to the moon to find future men have dug up the same slab -- excellent background but no drama -- and no reason for it being there. Then we take a trip to Jupiter because -- men think the slab came from there.

This episode has a conflict between men and an articulate computer. It might have been good, except for the lack of rationality. No motivation is provided for the computer's going mad, and the hero acts like a fool. He knows the cmputer can't be trusted, and we've seen that the computer can at least operate a rescue craft to bring back his dead friend. But he goes out himself, leaving his companions in hibernation to be killed by the computer.

Finally, we get an endless run of obvious and empty symbols on the screen, followed by our hero in a strange room. Apparently he's undergone intergalactic transfer and now grows old and dies in the room, followed by a metaphysical symbol at the end. The alien contact we've been promised is no more than a brief shot of the slab again.

If possible wait to see it for the effects until you can buy the soft cover book. Book and movie don't entirely agree, but maybe the book will provide some relief to the confusion of the movie.

The real message, of course, is one Kubrick has used before: intelligence is perhaps evil and certainly useless. The humanoid reaction and pointless madness of the computer show this. Men can only be saved by some vague and unshown mystic experience by aliens.

This isn't a normal science-fiction movie at all, you see. It's the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism. The New Thing advocates were exulting over it as a mind-blowing experience. It takes very little to blow some minds. But for the rest of us, it's a disaster.

It will probably be a box-office disaster, too, and thus set major science-fiction movie making back another ten years.

It's a great pity.

November 2007: The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

"The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death"
by Michiko Kakutani
June 18, 2002
New York Times Book Review

At first it sounds like a high-concept movie, one of those supernatural heart-tuggers like ''Ghost'' or ''The Sixth Sense'': the story of a teenage girl's rape and murder, and the fallout those events have on her family, as narrated from heaven by the dead girl herself.

As it turns out, however, Alice Sebold's first novel, ''The Lovely Bones,'' is anything but a hokey, Ouija-board mystery. What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy, much like Alice McDermott's ''That Night,'' about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed -- slowly, grudgingly and in fragments -- through love and acceptance.

In the novel's opening passage, Ms. Sebold's narrator introduces herself with matter-of-fact charm: ''My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie,'' she says. ''I was 14 when I was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the 70's, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen.''

Susie tells us right off what happened that awful day. She was taking a shortcut home from school when a neighbor known as Mr. Harvey lured her into a hideaway he'd built in a cornfield. He then brutally raped and murdered her -- as he'd done with a series of other girls -- and disposed of her body in a sinkhole. Her soul now inhabits a heaven that conforms to the lineaments of her 14-year-old dreams: there is a high school there, where the textbooks are Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue; there is a charming duplex for her and a roommate; and there are lots of dogs to play with.

From her vantage point in heaven, Susie looks down on the world, and she comes to believe that ''if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on earth.'' Not only is she able to follow the daily activities of her family -- her mom; dad; teenage sister, Lindsey; and baby brother, Buckley -- but she's also able to rewind their lives, to relive moments from their past from a cosmic VCR.

Being a ''watcher'' gives Susie the solace of staying in touch with her family, but at the same time it makes her yearn for her former life on earth. She is able to live vicariously through Lindsey -- sharing her sister's joy in falling in love with a boy, having sex for the first time and making plans for marriage -- but she is also reminded constantly that she has died before experiencing these rites of passage herself, that she now lives in a perpetual yesterday.

Her counselor in heaven warns her: ''If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.''

By providing Susie with omniscience of the past and present, Ms. Sebold -- the author of ''Lucky,'' a critically acclaimed memoir that chronicled her efforts to come to terms with being raped when she was a college freshman -- is able to construct an artful narrative that moves back and forth in time, while revealing what all of the principal characters, including the murderous Mr. Harvey, are thinking in the shadowed recesses of their minds.

For the members of Susie's family and their neighbors in a small suburban development, her murder rumbles through their lives like an avalanche: for some, it moves with breathtaking violence and speed, shattering old notions of safety and faith; for others, it moves in slow motion, catching them when they least expect it and tipping them off balance.

Susie's father is broken by her death: bereft and angry and convinced, in the ensuing days and weeks, that Harvey is the man who killed his daughter. When the police are unable to find evidence supporting his suspicion, he embarks on a one-man quest for justice that will earn him a reputation as a crackpot. Susie's mother desperately tries to escape the reality of her death, turning to an adulterous affair with a police detective, then leaving town altogether to try to invent a new life for herself, far away from her husband and surviving children.

Too young really to understand the disappearance of his sister, Buckley imagines that he continues to see Susie as he goes about his life. But Lindsey, so close to Susie in age and temperament, finds her life completely rocked by the loss of her sister. She tries to assume a mantle of detachment, to steel herself against the pain, but finds her classmates looking at her as a doppelgänger of a dead girl. She vows to help her father find evidence proving Mr. Harvey's guilt, a vow that will put her directly in the serial murderer's path.

Because Ms. Sebold makes us care so intensely about each member of the Salmon family, we are held rapt by their overlapping stories, fearful not only that Lindsey will fall prey to Mr. Harvey like her sister, but worried, as well, that the Salmons will never be able to reconstruct themselves as a family.

In the latter portions of the novel, Ms. Sebold's assured narration takes a few stumbles: there are portentous and highly abstract musings on Susie belonging to a historical continuum of murdered girls and women, and some unconvincing scenes dealing with an eccentric schoolmate's belief that she can somehow channel Susie's feelings.

In the end, however, even these lapses do not diminish Ms. Sebold's achievements: her ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family.

October 2007: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

by Richard Louv

"Growing up Denatured"
by Bradford McKee
New York Times
April 28, 2005

Were it not for the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Neil Figler said, his sons, 7 and 11, might never peel themselves away from the Xbox to go outside and play.

"My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games," said Mr. Figler, 47, a salesman and Cubmaster in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. In Scouting his sons have learned to light fires, handle knives and build sleds for trekking through the woods. But even those occasional encounters with nature are planned and supervised by adults.

Nonetheless, the outings seem wilder than most anything else going on in kidland these days. Mr. Figler said his sons find life easier and more familiar in front of a computer screen. Among the Scouts, he said, "that's more the norm than the exception."

The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. And parents can now add a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept: increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two with nature.

Doctors, teachers, therapists and even coaches have been saying for years that children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction.

But a new front is opening in the campaign against children's indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature.

The author Richard Louv calls the problem "nature-deficit disorder." He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children's fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization.

Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child.

"I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing," Mr. Louv (pronounced "loov") said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. "It's society's whole attitude that nature isn't important anymore," said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23.

Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers.

"We have mobile couch potatoes," Dr. Shifrin said. "The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?"

Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. "It's absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break," said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children - 10-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and a 6-year-old boy- in Acworth, Ga. "It is stronger than we are."

When Mr. Fillipitch was growing up he and his friends played baseball in a big field. "And if there weren't enough kids, you'd close right field," he said. His own children have bicycles, skateboards and a swing set, he said. But "there's this magnet pulling them into the house." It is the Nintendo GameCube. "I have to throw them outside."

Tracy Herzog, 42, a hospital fitness director and the mother of boys age 7 and 12 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in effect banishes her children outdoors, she said, by not allowing them near the television, the Game Boy or the PlayStation until after dark. And only if their homework is done.

"As parents we have to make it uncomfortable for them to be sedentary," Ms. Herzog said. "The temptation is to let the TV or PlayStation baby-sit them."

Playing on parental anxieties has become an industry unto itself, but substantive data are almost nonexistent on the presumably growing distance between children and bugs, flowers and seashells. Mr. Louv, who is also a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, has studied the topic as much as anyone. He interviewed about 3,000 children nationwide and many of their parents for his book.

Few if any scientific studies exist showing that children now spend less time exploring nature or describing the ways they benefit from being where the wild things are.

"Who's going to pay for that research?" Mr. Louv asked. "What toy can we sell for natural play?"

Stephen R. Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale whose book "Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection" (Island Press) is to be published this summer, said that he had not seen Mr. Louv's book but that ample anecdotal evidence exists to support its argument.

"When you look for the hard data, it's hard to find," Dr. Kellert said. "And people talk about children's contact with nature often in a very indiscriminate way."

Children, he said, experience nature in many settings, often indirectly. If the Internet or television prevents a child from looking for four-leaf clovers, it may also provide vicarious ways to discover Amazonian rain forests. But, he added, the passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that make natural exploration bracing.

The risk part, assuming that children do just want to wander or waste time outdoors, is perhaps never low enough for parents.

Tom Cara, 47, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill., said that he and his wife, Erin, take their son, 10, and daughter, 14, on bike trips and that he and his son, in particular, go camping and fishing in the Wisconsin wilderness. But it's hard to let children roam too freely, he said, because the news media have spooked parents with reports of child abductions and murders. "We've been conditioned to live in fear," he said.

That fear resounds for other parents, too. Mr. Figler, the Cubmaster, said that 12 rural acres lie behind his family's home, and that he and his sons often explore them together. But the woods are off limits to his younger son if he is alone. His older son may explore them, but only with a two-way radio. "It's more my wife than me" who worries, Mr. Figler said. But they both grew more concerned after their sons' school notified them that two registered sex offenders live nearby.

"We're in an awareness of safety now that may not have been as prevalent" in the past, Mr. Figler said. "You're always thinking about child abductions. You see the stories on TV, and it gets you nervous."

Like grim news stories, Amber Alerts, broadcast to help spot missing children, may also take a toll on parents' nerves by playing up the risk of criminal harm to their children. Dr. Daniel D. Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former chairman of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he understood the fear that parents have. But he said they need to balance that fear with reality and learn to create safe zones where their children can run around on their own.

"We definitely want kids to be able to go out and play," Dr. Broughton said. "The sedentary lifestyle is a huge problem in my practice every single day. I haven't gone a day where I don't see a kid who's too fat."

Mr. Louv refers to parents' abduction fears as "the bogeyman syndrome." But he suggests that the more likely bogeymen are people who "criminalize" outdoor play through neighborhood associations and their covenants. His own neighborhood's residents' association, he said, is known to go around tearing down tree houses.

"If all these covenants and regulations were enforced, then playing outdoors would be illegal," Mr. Louv said.

And to let a child loiter is almost unthinkable, said Hal Espen, the editor of Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M. "The ability to just wander around is a much more fraught and anxiety-prone proposition these days," he said. "There's a lot of social zoning to go along with the urban zoning."

For Ms. Herzog, the fitness director, the local schoolyard has become the latest casualty. It was fenced off recently for security: a "lockdown," she called it. "That doesn't allow active play on the school grounds" during off hours, Ms. Herzog said. "It's not getting any easier."

September 2007: Children of God

New York Times Book Review
May 24, 1998
by Jim Gladstone

This sequel to Mary Doria Russell's 1996 novel, ''The Sparrow,'' is at once more ambitious and somewhat less satisfying than its predecessor. Picking up the story of Father Emilio Sandoz -- a Jesuit who opts out of the priesthood after he returns to earth in the year 2060, having barely survived an intergalactic mission to the planet Rakhat -- Russell again offers a provocative mix of science, spiritualism and social policy as she cuts between two gradually merging plot lines. Sandoz's reluctant participation in a return mission to the place that once inspired his greatest religious awe is alternated with scenes of the violent civil unrest that erupted on Rakhat in the wake of human contact. While ''The Sparrow'' offered a resonant emotional center in the relationships within the ad hoc family of explorers on the first journey to Rakhat, Russell shifts her overall emphasis in ''Children of God'' from a small cluster of central characters to the complex interspecies conflicts of a faraway world, resulting in a book that's more diffuse in focus and a bit short on human heart. Very much a novel of unresolved ideas, ''Children of God'' heads toward its conclusion with Sandoz thinking ''whatever the truth is, blessed be the truth.'' Still, despite this philosophical muzziness, Russell succeeds in painting an alien culture with remarkably detailed verisimilitude.

August 2007: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

"Rabbit Redux"
by Edward Patrick Hearn
New York Times Book Review
May 14, 2006

Perhaps no other current American children's book writer has appeared on the scene so brightly and so quickly as Kate DiCamillo. Her heartfelt first novel, the genial dog-to-the-rescue tale "Because of Winn-Dixie" (2000), became a Newbery Honor book and a best seller. "The Tiger Rising" (2001), about two lonely children determined to release a caged animal, was nominated for the National Book Award. Then her odd story about a mouse who dares love a princess, "The Tale of Despereaux" (2003), won the coveted Newbery Medal.

DiCamillo's latest novel, "The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane," may well be her best. It is an elegant volume of creamy pages with a handsome typeface and generous margins in a pale green binding. Bagram Ibatoulline's haunting color plates and sepia illustrations at the beginning of each chapter evoke the era of Andrew Wyeth, Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish. The novel is set in the storybook land of no specific time or locale. There are no annoying cellphones or Starbucks cafes. Not even the pictures give a clue to the exact period covered by the events. It could be the America of the Great Depression reconstructed on a vast Hollywood back lot.

"The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane" belongs to an undervalued but nonetheless beloved genre concerning the private lives of playthings. Every toy has its own history, as Hans Christian Andersen knew in "The Steadfast Tin Soldier." Some tales, like Johnny Gruelle's once popular Raggedy Ann and Andy books and the Pixar pictures "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2," are entertaining fluff. Others, like DiCamillo's story, contain deeper implications. Rachel Field turned a doll's memoirs, "Hitty: Her First Hundred Years" (1929), into an American history lesson and a Newbery Medal winner. Margery Williams's "Velveteen Rabbit" (1922), William Steig's "Yellow & Pink" (1984) and Russell Hoban's supernal "Mouse and His Child" (1967) have been existential discourses. William Joyce explored similar territory in the lamentably underrated "Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs" (1996). It seems happy toys are all alike; every unhappy toy is unhappy in its own way.

Edward Tulane is a vain, self-absorbed three-foot-tall china rabbit from France who appears to have all he could want: fabulous clothes, a tiny gold pocket watch and a little girl, Abilene, who loves him. Then it all vanishes. Abilene's grandmother Pellegrina, who gave the child the china rabbit, is an unsettling kind of fairy godmother. She hovers about the house watchfully, and tells a disturbing tale about a beautiful, heartless princess who is transformed into a warthog and eaten because she cannot care for anyone but herself. The princess has no chance for redemption. Edward is luckier. But he disappoints Pellegrina, for she expects him to love Abilene as deeply as the child loves him.

When the family goes off on an ocean voyage, Pellegrina remains behind. That is when all the trouble starts. Edward's subsequent adventures unfold with much the same romantic abandon as the doll's in "Hitty." He too falls from grace and ends up in the water. Also like his predecessor, Edward is a passive character. He can neither walk nor talk. But he does think and observe and wonder.

His emotional journey through life encompasses several metamorphoses as a wide variety of owners adopt him. When a fisherman saves him from the sea, his wife calls him Susanna and puts a dress on him. But their nasty grown daughter tosses him in the trash. A hobo, reminiscent of one in "The Mouse and His Child," retrieves Edward from the garbage dump and names him Malone. Then he loses him. A crabby old woman uses him as a scarecrow in her cornfield until Bryce, an abused boy, rescues Edward for his poor little sister, Sarah Ruth. She christens him Jangles, and Bryce strings up the toy like a marionette to dance for money.

Loss is a common theme in DiCamillo's work. She has described "Because of Winn-Dixie" as "a book populated with stray dogs and strange musicians, lonely children and lonelier adults . . . all the kind of people that, too often, get lost in the mainstream rush of life." The writer often draws on the agony of her own childhood; her father left the family when she was 5. Edward Tulane does not realize what he has until it is gone.

He thinks he may have finally found unconditional love with Sarah Ruth, but she dies like Little Nell and Little Eva from incurable storybook sickness. His life is literally shattered when an angry diner owner dashes him on the counter edge. Then the toy rabbit suffers a symbolic death and resurrection. As seen on the book's somewhat sinister jacket, Edward enters the afterlife, in a Fellini-esque dream that returns him to the Tulane mansion on Egypt Street.

Of course this is a fairy tale: Edward, repaired, will end up in an antique shop and live happily ever after once an unexpected visitor walks in. There is at that moment the same slight chill of recognition shared when Peter Pan returns years later to Wendy, now a grown woman with a daughter of her own.

DiCamillo's style often echoes the rhythms and aspires to the grandiloquence of Victorian or Edwardian children's literature. More important for a young audience, she is a refreshingly graceful storyteller with a finely tuned ear for the discerning detail. True, "Edward Tulane" has the gratuitous vulgarity so expected in children's entertainments today: Rosie, the neighbor's brindled boxer, urinates on Abilene's family's dining room table and stains Edward's silk suit with drool. And perhaps the author's vocabulary is at times a bit inflated for young readers. (What child under 10 who has even heard the word ennui can grasp its meaning?) However, one reading is hardly enough to savor the rich philosophical nuances of DiCamillo's story. I think I will go read it again right now.

Michael Patrick Hearn's books include "The Annotated Wizard of Oz." His next, about children's book illustration in Russia, will be published in Moscow later this year.

July 2007: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

by Kim Edwards

Review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post
July 15, 2005

"Postpartum Blues"

My first daughter was born lifeless and gray-blue. "Like a seal," I remember thinking as the room went bright white and the doctor started suctioning her mouth. I pushed my wife's head back onto the pillow so she wouldn't be able to see the slick form down below. The oxygen tank hissed angrily. In the minutes that followed, as we waited and waited for my daughter to cry, all the hopes we'd stored up were suffocated under the weight of our new future that filled the room with fear.

Mercifully, few parents experience the shattering birth moment we did, and it may be that memories of my daughter's birth magnified the emotional impact of Kim Edwards's debut novel. But I think anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper's Daughter . The book opens during a snowstorm in Lexington, Ky., in 1964, when Norah Henry realizes that she's going into labor. The weather keeps her doctor from making it to the office in time, but her husband, David, is an orthopedic surgeon with enough experience to handle the situation. Under the partial influence of gas, Norah gives birth to a healthy baby boy, but as David tells her the happy news, another series of contractions begins. He quickly sedates his wife again, and she gives birth to another child, a girl with Down syndrome.

"Later," Edwards writes, "when he considered this night -- and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather -- what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling outside." In that quiet, terrifying moment, the grief and resentment caused by his sister's death at the age of 12 washes back over him, and he acts to preserve their vision of a happy future. He hands the baby to his nurse and asks her to take it to a home outside the city for handicapped children. When Norah awakens a few minutes later, he tells her their second baby was stillborn. "He had wanted to spare her," Edwards writes, "to protect her from loss and pain; he had not understood that loss would follow her regardless, as persistent and life-shaping as a stream of water. Nor had he anticipated his own grief, woven with the dark threads of his past."

Edwards has trouble maintaining the electrifying atmosphere of this long opening scene, but David's fateful decision that night is enough to power the novel through the next 25 years. The story runs along parallel tracks that don't converge until the very end: The first follows the picture-perfect Henry family, three healthy, talented people separated from one another by the secret that only David knows. The other track follows David's nurse, Caroline, who couldn't bring herself to follow his instructions that night. Instead, she left town with his baby, struggled through a series of part-time jobs, battled an unresponsive school system and managed to hammer out a joyful life.

As a single mother at a time when special-needs accommodations are unheard of or considered naively radical, Caroline would seem to have a far more difficult path to travel. Edwards does nothing to minimize or romanticize that struggle, but Caroline makes her humble way in the world through sheer determination and with the help of like-minded activist parents who are beginning to argue that children with disabilities should be raised at home and attend regular schools.

Those two sets of lives make for a thought-provoking contrast, a study in what really determines a family's happiness. With a successful, lucrative career, David can give his wife and son everything, except candor. As Edwards points out -- probably too many times -- the effort to conceal what he's done with their daughter poisons the atmosphere of their home with a colorless, odorless gas of deception. David throws himself into photography, a poignant attempt to freeze perfect moments and crop life just as he wants it. Barred from her husband's heart, Norah turns to alcohol, then to a series of affairs, trying to deaden or distract herself from a sense of loss she can't fully understand.

Some ominously saccharine moments indicate that Edwards can slip into the treacly trade -- "The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away"-- but these gaffes are relatively infrequent, especially considering the presence of a handicapped character, who would, in less disciplined hands, be used to generate a waterfall of sentimental tears.

The episodic structure allows Edwards to survey these two families through the '60s, '70s and '80s, but frankly she's best when she moves slowly. The middle section skips through the years, obscuring the characters behind Significant Historical Moments: Women's Lib, Vietnam, Disability Rights. The novel begins to look as though it's been planned by a divorced dad: Every alternating weekend encounter has to be packed with a major activity. This structural tendency may be the effect of Edwards's experience as a short story writer. We drop in on these characters only on important days -- separated by years that included all the minutiae of real life. They're reduced to saying things like, "The last few years have meant so much to me." I kept thinking, No, show the true nature of these people on a few ordinary days .

Edwards is entirely capable of doing that, as the opening and closing sections of her novel show. This tragedy of a man who thinks he can control how lives are redirected is as moving as the story of his nurse, who knows that her love can bless a damaged life. In the end, it's not just that David made a mistake in a moment of crisis; it's that he never realized that parenthood is an infinite series of opportunities for redemption. Years after the choice he could never forgive himself, for, as Caroline tells him, "You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy." Readers of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will find ample stores of both. ·

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.

June 2007: The Winter of Our Discontent

Biography from www.steinbeck.org

John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902 of German and Irish ancestry. His father, John Steinbeck, Sr., served as the County Treasurer while his mother, Olive (Hamilton) Steinbeck, a former school teacher, fostered Steinbeck's love of reading and the written word. During summers he worked as a hired hand on nearby ranches, nourishing his impression of the California countryside and its people.

After graduating from Salinas High School in 1919, Steinbeck attended Stanford University. Originally an English major, he pursued a program of independent study and his attendance was sporadic. During this time he worked periodically at various jobs and left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue his writing career in New York. However, he was unsuccessful in getting any of his writing published and finally returned to California.

His first novel, Cup of Gold was published in 1929, but attracted little attention. His two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown, were also poorly received by the literary world.

Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning in 1930. They lived in Pacific Grove where much of the material for Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row was gathered. Tortilla Flat (1935) marked the turning point in Steinbeck's literary career. It received the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal for best novel by a California author. Steinbeck continued writing, relying upon extensive research and his personal observation of the human condition for his stories. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) won the Pulitzer Prize.

During World War II, Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches were later collected and made into Once There Was a War.

John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 “...for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.”

Throughout his life John Steinbeck remained a private person who shunned publicity. He died December 20, 1968, in New York City and is survived by his third wife, Elaine (Scott) Steinbeck and one son, Thomas. His ashes were placed in the Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.

Autism from "The Story"

WUNC's The Story.

May 2007: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

"The Remains of the Dog"

By Jay McInerny

New York Times Book Review
June 15, 2003

The difference between literature and its imitations might be defined in any number of ways, but let's be reckless, even elitist, and propose that a literary novel requires new reading skills and teaches them within its pages, while a conventional novel -- whether it is about lawyers or professors or smart single girls -- depends on our ingrained habits of reading and perception, and ultimately confirms them as adequate to our understanding of the world around us. Mark Haddon's stark, funny and original first novel, ''The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,'' is presented as a detective story. But it eschews most of the furnishings of high-literary enterprise as well as the conventions of genre, disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.

Fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone of Swindon, England, seems, at first glance, an unpromising narrator for a novel -- a curious hybrid of reliable and unreliable. By his own admission he doesn't like fiction. He is incapable of lying, of understanding metaphor or jokes. He's also incapable of reading any but the most basic of human facial expressions. ''Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.'' His own range of emotional response is so limited he makes the repressed butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's ''Remains of the Day'' -- a novel that this one resembles in its elegant economy of means -- seem like Zorba the Greek.

The book's jacket copy identifies him as an autistic savant, but Christopher tells us all we need to know about his condition without reference to medical terminology -- just as well, since the term ''autism'' encompasses a variety of symptoms and behavioral problems that are still baffling behavioral scientists. The American Psychiatric Association definition includes ''problems with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and a restrictive repertoire of activities and interests.'' The problems of autism are related to how the brain processes, organizes and retrieves information; Christopher compares his own brain to a computer that is easily overloaded by multitasking. He has a photographic memory and is capable of working out complicated factoring problems in his head but is so overwhelmed by unfamiliar visual or verbal stimuli that sometimes he shuts down, holding his hands over his eyes or his ears while he groans or screams. He abhors physical contact, new environments and the colors yellow and brown.

Haddon manages to bring us deep inside Christopher's mind and situates us comfortably within his limited, severely logical point of view, to the extent that we begin to question the common sense and the erratic emotionalism of the normal citizens who surround him, as well as our own intuitions and habits of perception.

Christopher's mind is logical and literal in the extreme; early on he suggests that metaphor is a form of lying, pointing out that very few people actually have skeletons in their closets or apples in their eyes. ''When I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.'' Christopher's inability to tell lies is one of the many reasons he has difficulty engaging in, or understanding, normal social intercourse. And his distaste for falsehood is one reason he doesn't like novels, except for murder mysteries, which are essentially puzzles, Sherlock Holmes being his literary hero -- though he has problems with Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes's creator, who became involved with spiritualism later in life. Christopher's mind is purely scientific.

One of the subtle ironies of the book, given the evolution of the murder mystery detective toward the tough guys of Hammett and Chandler, is that young Christopher is ultimately far more hard-boiled than any gumshoe in previous detective fiction; unlike Sam Spade or Nick Charles, he has no sentimental streak, no underground reservoir of emotional identification with other human beings -- although he is fond of dogs.

When Christopher discovers his neighbor's poodle dead, skewered on a pitchfork, he sets out to solve the mystery and to write a true account of his detective work. In so doing he inadvertently stumbles upon the messy, illogical, emotionally complicated secrets of his parents and their neighbors. And even as he is finally forced to come to some limited accommodation of this knowledge, he makes a kind of plausible case for his own, ostensibly crippled worldview. Perhaps the greatest mystery here is whether Christopher is capable of change -- a question that goes to the heart of certain deeply held convictions about character.

If all this sounds somewhat grim and clinical, it's not. Christopher's skewed perspective and fierce logic make him a superb straight man, if not necessarily a stellar detective. In the course of interrogating one of his neighbors, while waiting impatiently for her to cut the chitchat, he observes: ''Mrs. Alexander was doing what is called chatting, where people say things to each other which aren't questions and answers and aren't connected. . . . I tried to do chatting by saying, 'My age is 15 years and 3 months and 3 days.' '' His inability to interpret basic social cues results in great moments of deadpan comedy, with strangers as well as with his patient, long-suffering father.

MIDWAY through the book, Christopher's quest for the dog's murderer becomes a search for his mother, who his father has told him is dead. His solo journey from Swindon to London is, for him, a terrifying leap into the unknown, as suspenseful and harrowing as anything in Conan Doyle. He literally sees everything around him and is unable to edit the onslaught of sensory data in a new environment. And he is afraid of strangers and ill equipped to ask for their help.

Christopher's book seemingly has a nice tidy ending, as he would have wished -- horrified as he is of indeterminacy. But this tidiness is an illusion, as the gulf between Christopher and his parents, between Christopher and the rest of us, remains immense and mysterious. And that gulf is ultimately the source of this novel's haunting impact. Christopher Boone is an unsolved mystery -- but he is certainly one of the strangest and most convincing characters in recent fiction.

Jay McInerney is the author of six novels, including ''Bright Lights, Big City,'' ''Brightness Falls'' and ''Model Behavior.'' He is working on his seventh.

April 2007: Atonement

"White Lies"
Tom Shone
March 10, 2002
New York Times Book Review

Ian McEwan's stony-titled new novel, ''Atonement,'' opens with a scene of pastoral bliss. It is 1935, an English summer is in full swing and parallelograms of morning light are making their way across the floor of the Tallis family's country house, where everyone is busy preparing for the return of Leon, the oldest son. This is exciting news for his younger sister, Briony, who is putting on a production of her new play. It's not such good news for her older sister, Cecilia, who will have to face her childhood friend, Robbie, whom she spent most of her time at Cambridge pointedly ignoring, and secretly falling in love with. So far, then, ''Atonement'' would seem to have very little to atone for, unless you were to count an above-average chance of being made into a Merchant-Ivory film.

This in itself should be enough to have hardened McEwan fans anxiously flicking back to check that it is indeed his name on the dust jacket. Just a few novels ago, McEwan was offering useful tips on how best to saw through a human thigh bone (remove the trousers first), and his last novel, ''Amsterdam,'' which won the 1998 Booker Prize, ended with a mutual euthanasia pact. Try getting that past Emma Thompson's agent. Yet here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel -- irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit -- that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago.

Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust. There's that date for a start, four years distant from the onset of the war, but still a little too close for comfort. Then there's the arrival of Leon's friend, Paul Marshall, a Quilty-like bore whose gaze lingers on the Tallis girls just that fraction of a second too long. Then there's the small matter of Briony. Or perhaps not so small; at 13, Briony stands on the threshold of adolescence, with all its itchy self-dramatizing instincts and glamorous mood swings. Contemplating the loss of a favorite dress, ''Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead.''

Such fantasies seem harmless enough, and another novelist might have mined them for their charm alone, but McEwan has always had an eye on the darker veins that course through children's imaginations. His recent book for children, ''The Daydreamer,'' had a nice Roald Dahl-like streak of malice to it, and his adult fiction has always heeded the close alliance between creative and destructive impulses. When Briony's plans for her play are derailed, her dramatic instincts look to feed elsewhere, and they find scandalized sustenance in glimpsed intimacies between Robbie and Cecilia. Before the night is out, a crime will be committed, a lie told and a little girl who thought herself the heroine of her own drama will find herself playing the villain in someone else's. So much for the soft bloom of innocence.

It would be shame to divulge exactly what happens on that night -- one of the great things about McEwan is how much faith he has in the urgings of plot. His books have a natural 45-degree tilt, leaning forward, through a fog of mounting unease, toward claret-dark revelation. Interestingly, what stays with you afterward is the unease, not the revelation. Rereading his novel ''Black Dogs'' recently, I remembered that the climax involved some dogs -- black ones, as I recall -- but couldn't remember what it was the mutts got up to. This is not an insult; on the contrary, McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma -- for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities.

The events of that night, for instance, account for only half the plot of ''Atonement'': the rest is reaction, ripple, repair. When the action reopens a few years later, Robbie is dodging German shells in France, Cecilia is praying for his safe return and Briony, now estranged from the both of them and working as a nurse, is busy piecing together soldiers in a London hospital: ''Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.''

Beside inducing an immediate desire to skip lunch, such details serve as a handy reminder of the Ian McEwan of old -- the McEwan who was dubbed ''Ian Macabre'' by the British press. They also illustrate how far he has come since then; his early short-story collections delivered their doses of disquiet neat, without narrative frill. Set against arid landscapes of urban desiccation, and beneath a persistent fug of moral rot, his narrators (mostly teenage males) whiled away their time in feverish fantasy and morbid self-exploration. ''I saw my first corpse on Thursday,'' begins one story from McEwan's 1978 collection, ''In Between the Sheets.'' Another began, ''Eaters of asparagus know the scent it lends the urine.''

This tone of sequestered self-disgust -- a Brobdingnagian desire to explore the innermost crevices of the human body, and by extension, psyche -- is a very prevalent one in English fiction, at least among young male writers. Most grow out of it at some point; some never quite shake it off (Martin Amis was still giggling over excrement gags in his last full-length novel, ''The Information''), and some, like Will Self, never think to try. But almost from the word go there were signs that McEwan was heading somewhere different: there was a moral pressure behind his sentences, a sense of his turning his radar outward to probe mental states other than his own. Women played a key part in this socialization of his talent. In ''The Comfort of Strangers'' he wrote about the intricate dynamics of a relationship for the first time; in ''The Child in Time'' he anatomized a marriage broken by the loss of a child and then revitalized by the birth of another. In both books his male involutes bore an acute sensitivity toward the feelings of others that is the lucky prerogative of reformed self-obsessives: McEwan's empathy seemed born of his earlier self-absorbtion.

It was an important fight to win. Many novelists can write about obsession -- it goes with the territory, so to speak, chiming with the tunnel vision required to write in the first place -- but only the best writers can step to one side and see what obsession looks like from the outside, in all its instantly sobering foolishness. McEwan can. There is a scene in ''The Innocent,'' for instance, in which the protagonist -- a repressed Englishman embarking on his first sexual relationship -- ends up virtually raping his girlfriend. Events accelerate through a series of misunderstandings; every sign of her resistance he takes to be part of some mysterious game of sexuality whose rules have hitherto been hidden from him, and which he rushes to learn. Thus does innocence stumble headlong into the worst sort of experience, and a mild-mannered man become a shame-faced rapist.

This is McEwan's specialty: scenes of vertiginous escalation, in which events skid out of control, first gradually and then wildly, to a point that leaves his shell-shocked protagonists anxiously replaying those events in their heads to divine the wrong turn. It is never at the point they think, but invariably the one several steps back in the chain, or the very chaining of events itself, that is at fault. McEwan is, in other words, a world-class expert on human violence -- its rules, roots and reverberations -- and in his more recent work he has set his diagnostic skills to work on larger confrontations. ''The Innocent'' burrowed deep into cold war spy games, and ''Black Dogs'' was set against the fall of the Berlin Wall -- although on occasion these backdrops came across as just that: geopolitical scrims hung loosely at the back, significance upgrades.

''Atonement'' marks the second time that McEwan has returned to the subject of World War II -- the great ignored, unignorable subject for a generation of English novelists, who have on the whole preferred to deal with it obliquely, as Kazuo Ishiguro did in ''The Remains of the Day.'' You can understand why; to deal with the war head-on risks having your novel taken aesthetic hostage. But obliquity is not without its own risks -- namely, that of perusing global upheaval for its symbolic niceties or chordal thematics.

This time around, McEwan has got it right. He launches a two-pronged attack. As Robbie is caught up in the long humiliated column of British forces trudging back to Dunkirk, McEwan keeps his focus tight and hallucinatory. Robbie is half asleep as he marches, and his consciousness registers a series of roadside details -- corpses, craters, a shoe shop, the drone of insects or the more alarming drone of oncoming German fighters, which sharpen McEwan's prose into some of its characteristic split-second clarity: ''The broad spray of fire was advancing up the road at 200 miles an hour, a rattling hailstorm din of cannon rounds hitting metal and glass. No one inside the near-stationary vehicles had started to react. Drivers were only just registering the spectacle through their windscreens. They were where he had been seconds before.''

And then we have Briony's perspective on the results, as she tends to the wounded and the dying in London, seeking to salve their sundered flesh, in atonement for the damage she caused as a child. This may sound a little too symbolic, and it is, but the symbolism is Briony's not McEwan's, and the main reason she makes such a lousy nurse. Briony's atonement will instead lie elsewhere, in the fiction she writes at night, designed to ''show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive'' -- a noble aim that receives slight amendment from none other than Cyril Connolly, who writes, in a gracious rejection letter: ''Your most sophisticated readers might be well up on the latest Bergsonian theories of consciousness, but I'm sure they retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens.''

Normally, one might balk at this sort of self-product placement: a novelist lays down, within a novel, aesthetic prescriptions that just happen to be perfectly embodied by the novel he has just written. But we'll let it pass this once, for the virtues subscribed to by Briony are a perfect fit for McEwan's: if it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and ''Atonement'' your novel. It is his most complete and compassionate work to date.

March 2007: About Alice

"Scenes from a Marriage"
by Peter Stevenson
New York Times Book Review
January 14, 2007

With the 21st-century profusion of first-person narrative nonfiction — between the covers of books and in the pages of magazines and newspapers and, most recently, in the glut of blogs like so many glowworms illuminating a constellation of iMacs and BlackBerries and Treos — the modern reader can be forgiven for approaching the first-person pronoun with trepidation, as if that skyscraping rune “I” were a sequoia about to come crashing down on the reader’s head. (Would that the groaning shelf of memoirists had realized that Tom Wolfe’s diagnosis of the “Me Decade” was a warning, not an exhortation to go forth and multiply oneself!)

To read a first-person narrative too often involves being clamped in an embrace by a writer who means well but insists on meaning too much. The banality of ego.

And yet.

Sometimes we come across a piece of first-person writing that shocks us back into a restorative innocence vis-à-vis the human heart. The secret of Calvin Trillin’s slim but walloping book, “About Alice,” is that its structure follows the contours of an old-fashioned piece of reportage, using a scrim of detachment to build tension and, when that is pulled aside, revealing an underlying core of enchantment. “About Alice” is an unabashed love letter to Trillin’s wife, Alice, who died in 2001 at the age of 63 while awaiting a heart transplant, after a battle with lung cancer 25 years previously had left her heart weakened by radiation.

This book can be seen as a worthy companion piece to other powerful accounts of spousal grief published in the last decade: Joan Didion’s tale of John Gregory Dunne’s fatal heart attack, John Bayley’s memoir of Iris Murdoch’s decline from Alzheimer’s and Donald Hall’s narration of Jane Kenyon’s death from leukemia.

For decades, Trillin has propelled himself as the bumbling leading man through books on food — he’s a prodigious eater — travel and Americana, while remaining teasingly enigmatic and out of reach, safely reclining on the dry banks of wit. It’s hard to think of another writer who delivers so much pleasure, sentence for sentence. In “Travels With Alice”: “It was at that moment that I realized something essential about American travel: Americans drive across the country as if someone’s chasing them.” Johnny Carson found him irresistible, and had him on “The Tonight Show” more than 30 times.

In “About Alice,” rather than memorialize his own grief, he returns Alice to the world before he met her — back to the Wellesley-educated, Hofstra University English teacher Trillin fell in love with at a party for a political satire magazine in 1963. “When I saw Alice at that Monocle party, she was wearing a hat. At least, I’ve always remembered her as wearing a hat. She later insisted that she’d never owned a hat of the sort I described. Maybe, but I can still see her in the hat — a white hat, cocked a bit to the side.”

When “About Alice” appeared in shorter form in The New Yorker last spring, people couldn’t wait to tell their friends to read it. Trillin had written about a marriage in which neither partner seems to have done any grievous or even subtle harm to the other. It was as if he had traveled out beyond familiar territory and brought back a moon rock, something worthy of preserving.

And you could tell: he and Alice had a ball. Weeks after their first meeting, he pursued her to another party: “At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. ... Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, ‘You have never again been as funny as you were that night.’

“ ‘You mean I peaked in December of 1963?’ I’d say, 20 or even 30 years later.

“ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ”

Trillin leaves no doubt he was smitten with his wife, as were others. He writes: “At parties, she often attracted what I called ‘guys smoking pipes,’ who wanted to impress her with their suavity or intellectual range. ‘He wasn’t smoking a pipe, by the way,’ she’d say, knowing just which guy I was talking about when I mentioned ‘that guy with a pipe’ as we discussed a party on the way home.”

In 1976 Alice — who’d never smoked but grew up with a chain-smoking mother and cigar-smoking father — coughed up a spot of blood. Ten days later she had a lobe of her left lung removed. A doctor told Trillin there was a 10 percent chance she’d survive beyond a year or two. But she did and she returned to her life as a wife and mother of two girls and to a career that included producing arts programming for PBS. Years later, Trillin writes, “I was walking through an airport to catch a plane back to New York when, apropos of nothing, the possibility that things could have gone the other way in 1976 burst into my mind. I could see myself trying to tell my girls that their mother was dead. I think I literally staggered. I sat down in the nearest chair. I wasn’t in tears. I was in a condition my father would have called poleaxed. A couple of people stopped to ask if I was all right. I must have said yes. After a while, the pictures faded from my mind. I walked to the gate and caught my flight to New York. Alice was there. The girls were there. Everything was all right.”

If the marriage as described seems somewhat formal, that may be because Trillin, now 71, came of age at a time predating the supposition that a man will enter a relationship armed with the daggers and consolations of psychological insight. Trillin grew up in Kansas City, Mo., the son of a grocer whose advice was “You might as well be a mensch.” He attended Yale in the 1950s (“I remember realizing in my sophomore year that I had arrived at Yale never having heard of either Dostoyevsky or Greenwich”). His book “Remembering Denny” (1993) unpacks that tightly laced era through the eyes of one of its casualties, Roger Hansen, known as Denny, a Yale golden boy — Life covered his graduation — who committed suicide at 55. The story is one of class, privilege, a hidden sex life — and yet there is nothing lurid in Trillin’s telling, perhaps because he trained at William Shawn’s New Yorker. Likewise in “About Alice,” Trillin chooses not to mention the uncanny date of Alice’s death: Sept. 11, 2001.

As the condolence letters arrived, Trillin realized his readers didn’t know Alice beyond her persona as the “voice of reason, the sensible person who kept everything on an even keel despite the antics of her marginally goofy husband.”

“They may not have known her,” he writes, “but they knew how I felt about her. It surprised me that they had managed to divine that from reading stories that were essentially sitcoms. Even after I’d taken in most episodes of ‘The Honeymooners,’ after all, it had never occurred to me to ponder the feelings Ralph Kramden must have had for Alice Kramden. Yet I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, ‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?’ ”

Peter Stevenson is executive editor of The New York Observer.

"A Man Worth Knowing"

From Imprimis, the magazine of Hillsdale College. A speech by David McCullough:

http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2006/05/

February 2007: John Adams

David McCullough

"Plain Speaking"
by Pauline Maier
New York Times Book Review
May 27, 2001

David McCullough set out initially to write a joint biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But he worried, as he explained to lecture audiences over the past few years, that Adams could not hold his own with Jefferson. Once he started doing research, his concern shifted. Could Jefferson stand up to Adams? McCullough's biography of Adams inevitably has a lot to say about Jefferson, but on virtually all points of comparison between the two men, Jefferson comes in second.

McCullough's preference is part of a trend. As Jefferson's reputation has gone into something of a decline, appreciation for John Adams has soared. For example, Joseph J. Ellis, the author of ''Founding Brothers'' and of books on both Jefferson and Adams, makes no secret of his partiality toward Adams. On the scale of historical judgments, this reversal of standing is revolutionary. Jefferson's pre-eminence has lasted, with some ups and downs, for two centuries, and rumors of its end are surely premature. But why has Adams at last become so competitive a rival?

The hero of McCullough's ''John Adams'' is curiously reminiscent of Harry S. Truman, the straight-speaking Missourian whom McCullough celebrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography nine years ago. The descendant of farmers from Braintree, Mass., Adams loved to talk and always said exactly what he thought. Like Truman, who ''never tried to appear as something he was not,'' Adams remained true to his origins: his hands, McCullough says, were those of a man ''accustomed to pruning his own trees, cutting his own hay and splitting his own firewood.'' Similarly, throughout a long life, his wife, Abigail, did her own sewing and baking, fed her own ducks and chickens and churned her own butter. Abigail read widely but spoke like a Yankee: she said ''Canady'' for Canada, ''set'' for sit, ''aya'' for yes. So did John, though McCullough doesn't say so. In the 1850's, the first editor of Adams's writings, his grandson Charles Francis Adams, carefully corrected his language, excising expressions like ''he eat strawberries'' or ''she ain't obliged'' in an effort to fit John Adams into a heroic mode. It was hopeless; Adams was too obstreperously real to be idealized.

Yet few men, McCullough argues, contributed more to the early history of the United States. In 1776, Adams was, in Jefferson's words, ''the colossus of independence,'' the delegate most responsible for the Continental Congress's adopting independence. As a diplomat in Europe during the 1780's, he secured a loan from the Dutch without which, McCullough suggests, the Revolution might have failed. He served as vice president ''with unfailing loyalty to Washington,'' whose administration he supported by casting a still unmatched 31 tie-breaking votes in the Senate. In his own presidency, McCullough says, Adams ''achieved a rare level of statesmanship'' by beginning peace negotiations with the French Republic, an act of reconciliation that alienated many Federalist supporters and jeopardized his chance of re-election in 1800. On one contested issue after another over the course of his career -- his insistence as an American emissary that France could stop British resistance to American independence by deploying its navy along the coast of North America; his early suspicion of the French Revolution; his hearty support for an American Navy -- Adams proved right in the end.

Above all, however, McCullough's appreciation for Adams, like his appreciation for Truman, depends on an adherence to certain old-fashioned moral guidelines, which is to say on strength of character. All contemporary observers affirm Adams's scrupulous honesty: he was, as the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush testified, ''a stranger to dissimulation.'' Adams also shared with his wife a powerful sense of public duty, which they fulfilled despite great financial and emotional sacrifice.

No one, and certainly not John Adams, made a fortune serving the United States in the late 18th century: ''All my emoluments as a member of Congress for four years,'' Adams observed in 1777, were ''not . . . sufficient to pay a laboring man on a farm.'' The Adamses' financial welfare depended on their Massachusetts farm, which Abigail managed even in trying circumstances with great skill. As a result, for all but a few exceptional years during Adams's long public career, he and Abigail lived dutifully but miserably apart.

In fact, McCullough is able to tell the extraordinary love story that threads through ''John Adams'' because the couple had so often to communicate through letters, which they saved. Abigail was John's partner in every sense: she not only managed the family's finances but was his greatest supporter, his most trusted political adviser and a source and object of immense affection. She pushed women's traditional domestic role to its outermost limits without questioning it: ''I believe nature has assigned each sex its particular duties and sphere of action,'' she once wrote, ''and to act well your part, 'there all the honor lies.' ''

Acting her part well demanded that she ''sacrifice to my country'' the comfort of John's presence, a loss that she accounted among her ''greatest misfortunes.'' Eventually John's need for Abigail overcame all other considerations, and he asked her to join him. ''I must go to you or you must come to me,'' he wrote to her from France; ''I cannot live without you.'' In 1793, when they had been married for almost 30 years, Abigail commented that time subdued ''the ardor of passion'' and left in its place a deep-rooted, enduring ''friendship and affection.'' But John's ardor seemed slow to cool. Once, after she mentioned that he was 60 years old, he replied that ''if I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above 40.''

Adams, a short, chunky New Englander and a combative, nonstop talker, might seem the antithesis of Jefferson, a tall, thin Virginian who rarely spoke in public, ''abhorred dispute'' and, when involved in political controversies, preferred to act covertly. Their lives, though, were inextricably intertwined. They fought together for independence in 1776, worked as a diplomatic team in Europe during the 1780's and carried on a wonderful correspondence from 1812 until their deaths on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Even in the 1790's, when Adams and Jefferson became politically estranged, McCullough observes, they had much in common. Both distrusted Alexander Hamilton and wanted peace with France.

Honesty and consistency, however, were not among Jefferson's strengths. He tailored comments to their recipients, even to the point of contradicting himself. When confronted with embarrassing accusations, McCullough demonstrates, Jefferson was not above denying responsibility for things he had done. Jefferson's public dedication also fell short of Adams's. For personal reasons, both wanted desperately to leave the Congress -- then the country's entire national government -- in the summer of 1776. But the war was going badly. Finally, on Sept. 3, after some weeks' delay, Jefferson, who had been in Philadelphia since mid-May, set out for Monticello. The next day Adams, who had been at Congress since February, wrote Abigail that the nation's needs demanded his service -- and he remained at work until mid-October. A year later, when only 20 delegates sat in Congress, a homesick Adams was there again, trying to increase attendance. ''Your country is not quite secure enough to excuse your retreat to the delights of domestic life,'' he wrote Jefferson, who remained resolutely at home. (''When I attend on my own feelings,'' Adams confessed, he could not blame him.) Later Adams left Abigail behind to serve the United States in France; Jefferson accepted a diplomatic assignment only after his wife had died. ''Never once,'' McCullough notes, did Adams refuse a mission for his country ''because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.''

Their financial habits also distinguished the two men. Jefferson was ''a chronic acquirer.'' He had such fun shopping in Philadelphia, Paris and London that no one would guess he had an intellectual disdain for cities. Jefferson rented elegant homes, then went into debt to remodel them, and was prepared to sell some of his slaves if their labor could not pay off his obligations. By contrast, the Adamses lived simply to make ends meet, and when Abigail expanded the house the Adamses acquired in Quincy, Mass., she paid for it out of savings. John Adams's net worth at death was about $100,000; Jefferson left an estate over $100,000 in arrears. His slaves, furniture and farm equipment were auctioned off, and Monticello had to be sold ''for a fraction of what it had cost.''

Even Jefferson's political achievements come out second best. McCullough gives Jefferson credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence, which he invested with ''grace and eloquence . . . superbly and in minimum time.'' But can the work of a few days outweigh the more substantive, sustained work of Adams on behalf of independence? If Adams had not delivered the votes, Jefferson's draft would have been at best a historical curiosity. Even the outstanding event of Jefferson's presidency, the Louisiana Purchase, depended, McCullough observes, on peace with France -- which Adams had won.

McCullough's reckoning all but ignores the irascibility that undermined Adams's reputation among his contemporaries. Franklin once described him as ''sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.'' His enemies claimed that Adams was subject to ''paroxysms of anger'' or ''actually insane.'' Even Abigail admitted he was irritable (though she described that as his single flaw). McCullough claims that Adams's ''outbursts of temper'' occurred only in ''private confrontations'' and plays down or explains away instances of extreme public behavior (his strange insistence that Washington be called ''His Majesty the President,'' his predawn flight from Washington on Jefferson's inaugural day). The result is an admirable but curiously flat John Adams.

Yet for some historians, Ellis above all, Adams's fiery temperament and resolute contrarianism are part of his charm. After his retirement, for example, Adams denounced the tendency to make demigods of men like Washington and Franklin and, an old Puritan to the end, called for a second Protestant Reformation to wash away such idolatry. The Revolution, Adams insisted, was a collective enterprise of ordinary people punctuated by division and acrimony at every step. In 1811, he confessed ''a very great secret'' to a young American: ''As far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe we were better than you are.'' He insisted that there was more talent among Americans of the 1820's than those of the 1770's, and that the young were eminently capable of securing the liberties for which his generation had fought. How can we fail to love that crotchety old man? The capacities he affirmed are ours.

John Adams doubted that historians would ever record the history of the Revolution accurately. Now, 175 years after his death, we can at last give Adams the esteem he deserves. It remains true nonetheless that the wonderfully congenial subject of McCullough's carefully researched, lovingly written biography is more consistently companionable, and also less interesting, than John Adams was in his own time.

* You can also listen to a 24-minute audio interview with David McCullough from 2001. (It's on the NYT site, and may require login. )

January 2007: The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay

"Everything but Sex (Lack of Time)"
by Christopher Lehman-Haupt
New York Times Book Review
June 19, 1999

If a shrewdly programmed computer were to design the ultimate international best seller, it couldn't do much better than this first novel by Bryce Courtenay, an advertising man from Sydney, Australia.

On almost any scale of measurement, ''The Power of One'' has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; snakes, bats and Nazis; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama in the boxing ring and disasters in a copper mine. It's even got a Jewish joke: Why did the piece of bread dropped by the little cobbler in the shtetl fall with the honeyed side up? Because he had honeyed it on the wrong side.

In fact, the only thing missing in ''The Power of One'' is sex. And this lack can't be attributed to any modesty on the author's part. It's just that Mr. Courtenay's hero hasn't time for sex. He's too busy growing up and triumphing over the incredible odds against him.

Any summary of ''The Power of One'' is bound to make it sound unbelievable. Its 5-year-old hero, a South African boy of English descent known simply as Peekay, seems a little on the young side to be torn away from his Zulu nanny and sent to a boarding school where he is brutally persecuted by the older Afrikaners for the role of his presumed ancestors in the Boer War.

There's a comic-book quality to the way Peekay's scrawny pet chicken, Granpa Chook, tries to protect his master and to the violence with which Granpa Chook is killed by the Afrikaner known as the Judge, who has tattooed his arm with a swastika in anticipation of Adolf Hitler's arrival in South Africa.

And the prose can be irritatingly cute and sentimental. ''By bedtime Nanny was at my side as usual, arriving with a large sweet potato, its tummy open with a spoon sticking out of the middle, tiny wisps of steam curling upwards and condensing on the handle. There is something about a sweet potato that cheers you up when you are low and celebrates with you when you are happy. Sweet potatoes baked in their jackets have a very large comfort factor built into them.''

Still, Peekay's story races along. His family gets him released from the terrible school. On the train going home he meets a boxer who inspires him to become the welterweight champion of the world. At home, he is befriended by a botanist and musician named Karl von Vollensteen whom Peekay calls Doc and who tells Peekay to stand on one leg and say: ''No matter what has happened bad, today I'm finished being sad. Absoloodle!''

When World War II begins and Doc gets arrested for being a German alien, Peekay is allowed to pay regular visits to the prison, where he discovers a boxing team and a half-caste inmate named Geel Piet who is willing to train him in exchange for certain favors.

Despite your better instincts you get involved in ''The Power of One.'' You accept Mr. Courtenay as a natural if somewhat naive storyteller, and the incredibility of it all begins to dissolve. What did the trick for this reader happened to be Doc's speech to Peekay's born-again Christian mother on the subject of the cactus. ''God and I have no quarrels, madame,'' Doc says. ''The Almighty conceived the cactus plant. If God would choose a plant to represent him, I think he would choose of all plants the cactus. The cactus has all the blessings he tried, but mostly failed, to give to man. . . . It is the plant of patience and solitude, love and madness, ugliness and beauty, toughness and gentleness. Of all plants, surely God made the cactus in his own image? It has my enduring respect and is my passion.''

But for other readers the hook may be the moment when Peekay, as a 6-year-old, boxes his first three rounds and wins. Or when his coach, Geel Piet, is secretly beaten to death by a racist prison administrator. Or when Peekay first discovers the Power of One, ''that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out.''

Or when Doc von Vollensteen gives a piano concert for the prisoners and plays for them his newly composed ''Concerto for the Great Southland,'' which incorporates the melodies of the inmates' various tribal songs: ''Never had a composer's work had a stranger debut and never a greater one. Eventually the composition would be played by philharmonic and symphony orchestras around the world, accompanied by some of the world's most famous choirs, but it would never sound better than it did under the African moon in the prison yard when 350 black inmates lost themselves in their pride and love for their tribal lands.''

According to the novel's concluding biographical note, Mr. Courtenay was born in South Africa, was educated there and in England and, in 1958, immigrated to Australia, where he went into the advertising business. If the old cliche is true that copywriters are frustrated novelists, then Mr. Courtenay should be ''finished being sad,'' as Doc von Vollensteen would say.

Absoloodle!

December 2006: Bel Canto

Ann Patchett

"Uninvited Guests Wearing You Down? Listen to Opera."
by Janet Maslin
New York Times Book Review
May 31, 2001

In a novel that begins with a kiss and absolutely deserves one, the most powerful electronics executive in Japan is invited to celebrate his birthday in a South American country. This place is unnamed and, as will be instantly demonstrated, unstable. Midway through the lavish party, terrorists appear and take the guests hostage, including the most celebrated person on the premises.

The whole birthday event was contrived as a bribe in hope that a factory would be built by Mr. Hosokawa, the music-loving founder and chairman of the Nansei Corporation. And his precious birthday gift had arrived in the form of the world-renowned lyric soprano Roxane Coss. She is a great beauty, with a voice that makes listeners melt, and said to ''make Callas look like a spear carrier'' in the bargain.

''Italy, England and America,'' the astounded diva chants to herself as the terrorists take over, vowing never to take on lucrative but iffy singing jobs outside those three reliable nations again. As for the other guests, forced to the floor, they begin to talk and murmur ''until the room became a cocktail party in which everyone was lying prone.'' And somehow, what initially looked like a frightening situation becomes instead a peculiarly entrancing one, as it becomes clear that partygoers, generals and guerrillas will all be trapped for an indefinite period in the vice president's mansion. The president, whom the terrorists had hoped to capture, had been otherwise engaged because his favorite soap opera was on television.

Now it is real opera that becomes foremost in this elegantly alluring book, as the international group of detainees find that music has become their common language. The one thing they share is rapture at the beauty of Roxane's voice, and rest assured that she knows how to use it. When one of the generals in charge of the siege tries to deny Roxane a box of sheet music, she says to Mr. Hosokawa's translator (who is suddenly the most valuable person on the premises): ''Tell him that's it. Either he gives me that box right now or you will not hear another note out of me or that piano for the duration of this failed social experiment.''

''Really?'' the translator asks.

''I don't bluff,'' Roxane answers.

One of the delightful things about the way ''Bel Canto'' unfolds is the way Ann Patchett uses the ordeal of entrapment to locate unexpected resources in her characters, like Roxane's new leadership potential. Another surprising quality to emerge, in a book that works both as a paean to art and beauty and a subtly sly comedy of manners, is the flair that the host shows for running the household, once he realizes that being taken hostage has ruined his political career. ''With a dish towel knotted around his waist, he took on the qualities of a charming hotel concierge. He would ask, 'Would you like some tea?' He would ask, 'Would it be too much of an imposition to vacuum beneath the chair in which you were sitting?' Everyone was very fond of Ruben. Everyone had completely forgotten that he was the vice president of the country.''

As the book moves along and a new, impromptu civilization is born beneath the vice president's roof, Ms. Patchett, whose earlier books include ''The Patron Saint of Liars'' and ''The Magician's Assistant,'' lets her characters' new lives bloom like flowers. The quality of enchantment even goes so far as to let one of the soldiers, after all the female hostages except Roxane have been freed, turn out to be a beautiful young woman named Carmen. Fair enough, a book with opera in its soul needs a Carmen, even if this one has never heard such singing before. And even if she is here mostly to fall in love with the Japanese translator during 2 a.m. language lessons in the china closet. Although this novel is entirely housebound, at the vice presidential mansion, Ms. Patchett works wonders to avoid any sense of claustrophobia and keeps the place fresh at every turn.

''The soldiers spent most of their days exploring the house, eating the pistachio nuts they found in the pantry, sniffing the lavender hand lotion in the bathroom,'' she writes, while the library full of leather furniture and leather-bound books ''had the comforting and familiar smell of cows standing in the hot sun.'' For all the 58 people who are ultimately trapped here, this place comes to represent both an end and a beginning, a chance to experience the aesthetic and the sensual, to fall in love with music and experience, while their lives hang in the balance. Like Mr. Hosokawa, who once felt that ''the records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love,'' they spend every moment of this crisis in a state of being newly alive.

And what of the power of politics over art? Well, one of the more humorous moments in the novel concerns an effort to make the translator ask Roxane to help with the cooking, but she soon puts a stop to that. Then the three ruling generals have a conversation about perhaps forcing her to sing in Spanish instead of Italian, or trying to regulate the hours when she practices. ''If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day,'' suggests the most rigid of them. Replies the wisest general: ''Try it first with a bird.''

October 2006: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith

I ran across an online course syllabus for a graduate-level English class at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign called "20th Century American Bestsellers," and it has some interesting notes about the novel, submitted as part of a student's assignment, I believe. Here's the site if you're interested. I'll post some relevant text below:

Contemporary Reception:

While the majority of critics of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn indulgently praised Betty Smith's first novel, others expressed only reluctant approval or no approval at all. What little conflict existed among 1943 reviews primarily dealt with doubts about the book's literary value. Skepticism was partially founded on the fact that Smith, a novice novelist, had yet to be established as a writer or literary fiction. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn suffered from accusations of following a predictable pattern of events that were woven together in an overly sentimental fashion. The vague sexual incidents in the novel also stirred up mild controversy among the more conservative critical minds of mid-20th-century America.

Margaret Winning in Commonwealth summed up popular opinion of the book by describing it as "Beauty, wholesome philosophy, and honesty intermingled with stark realism, poverty, and continued struggle." Favorable, almost doting descriptions such as these were nearly ubiquitous. Meyer Berger in New Republic called the book "a faithful picture of a part of Brooklyn that was mostly slums and misery. The picture is softened by almost poetic handling." The manner in which Smith gently yet truthfully exposed the poverty of her characters won her acclaim from the political arena as well. An anonymously authored excerpt from The New York Times called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn "a remarkably good first novel," and inferred that it was a revolutionary advance in the literary world. "The author sees the misery, squalor, and cruelty of slum life but sees them with understanding, pity, and sometimes with hilarious humor. A welcome relief from the latter-day fashion of writing about slum folk as if they were all brutalized morons."

Interspersed with this positive feedback were statements of doubt concerning the morality and literary merit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Some reviewers such as Margaret Winning in Commonwealth worried that the novel's "stark realism" was perhaps too stark, meaning that Smith's "wholesome philosophy" was accompanied by rather unwholesome sexual "incidents" that "may be too realistic for some readers." In critique of the novel's literary qualities, an anonymous article in Booklist reluctantly conceded that "as literary genre the book is interesting" but went on to say "the progress of the family from rags to riches could stand considerable blue pencilling." Rosemary Dawson in The New Yorker offered considerable praise of the beginning part of the novel, going so far as to call it "a beautiful and moving piece of work." Her disappointment with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a work of literature was found in the end of the novel, where she accused it of taking on "more the mechanics of the usual popular piece of fiction." The most scathing criticism by far came from Diana Trilling in Library Journal:

"I am a little bewildered by so much response to so conventional a little book… I have seen 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' compared to the novels of James Farrell, and all to the credit of Miss Smith's novel. This makes me very sad both for the condition of fiction reviewing and for Mr. Farrell, whatever his faults as a novelist of stature. Of course Francie Nolan's story is more cheerful than Danny O'Neill's and a more popular commodity, but surely popular taste should be allowed to find its emotional level without being encouraged to believe that a 'heart-warming' experience is a serious literary experience."

Cumulative Reviews:
Diana Trilling, Library Journal, May 1, 1943
New York Times, August 22, 1943
Book Week, August 22, 1943
Weekly Book Review, August 22, 1943
Rosemary Dawson, New Yorker, August 24, 1943
Springfield Republican, August 29, 1943
F.H. Bullock, Time, September 6, 1943
Meyer Berger, New Republic, September 6, 1943
Katharine Jocher, Saturday Review of Literature, September 11, 1943
Booklist, September 1943
Margaret Winning, Commonwealth, September 17, 1943
America Chapel, Atlantic, October 1943
New Yorker, October 9, 1943
Saturday Review of Literature, October 16, 1943
E.M.B., Social Forces, December 1943
Orville Prescott, Wisconsin Library Bulletin, October 1943
Yale Review, Autumn 1943
New York Times Magazine, December 12, 1943
New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1944
New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1944
New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1944
Publishers Weekly, May 27, 1944
Collier's, March 10, 1945

Sources:
Book Review Digest. 39th Annual Cumulation. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1944.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 14. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1945.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 15. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1947.

Biography

Betty Smith was born as Elizabeth Wehner near the turn of the century in Brooklyn, New York. There is a discrepancy concerning the exact date of her birth. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, she was born on December 15th, 1896. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, she was born 4 days later on December 19th. According to the Library of Congress' records, Betty was born 8 years later in 1904, although her daughters claim the earlier year, which is inscribed on her tombstone, is the correct one.

Betty was the oldest child of German immigrants John and Catherine Hummel Wehner. Her father died when she was twelve, and her mother later married an Irish immigrant named Michael Keogh. Desperate household economic conditions forced Betty to quit school and join the work force shortly after her father's death. As a fourteen-year-old with merely an eighth grade education, she found herself working at factory, office, and retail jobs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In addition to learning to cook, sew, and dance at the Jackson Street settlement house, Betty developed an avid interest in the theater. In her spare time, she acted in several plays at the Williamsburg YMCA and she composed about seventy short dramatic plays.

The date of Betty's first marriage is also uncertain. In either 1913 or 1914, she married her childhood friend George H. E. Smith. The couple moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where George studied law at the University of Michigan. Permission was granted for Betty to enroll in the University as a special student between 1921 and 1922, and also between 1927 and 1931. During this time, Betty gave birth to two daughters named Nancy and Mary. She took every writing course offered at the University, but never earned a degree. In either 1930 or 1931 (the date is once again uncertain), Betty won the University's first annual Avery Hopwood Award and received $1000 for her play "Francie Nolan."

Shortly thereafter, the four members of the Smith family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. Betty continued to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, where for three years she studied under George P. Baker, Walter P. Eaton, and John Mason Brown and participated in Federal Theater projects. In 1934, the family moved to Detroit where Betty wrote features for the Detroit Free Press. After divorce ended her marriage in 1938, Betty and her daughters moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While studying at the University of North Carolina, she earned a meager income by writing and acting for small local plays.

In her spare time, Betty wrote an autobiographical manuscript roughly based on her own childhood experiences. She entered this 1000-page manuscript in a Harper and Brothers writing contest. The publishing company coerced Betty to condense the manuscript into a 400-page novel that she decided to title A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Published in 1943, the novel sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks and immediately found itself at the top of bestseller lists everywhere. During the first month of publication, Betty married the assistant editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, Joseph Piper Jones.

Betty wrote three other novels, none of which achieved similar success to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, though her second novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better, was a bestseller for 1948. Her third novel, Maggie-Now was published in 1958, seven years after she divorced her second husband, and one year after she married her third and final husband, Robert Finch, an old friend. Her last novel, Joy in the Morning, was written in 1963, two years after Finch's death.

Secluded from the public, Betty passed away on January 17th, 1972 in Shelton, Connecticut. She left behind an unfinished autobiography that was never published. These and other manuscripts remain at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.