stumbling virtue

Happy Anniversary, Part II

Indeed.

 

The Best Books I Read During the 2000s

I only started writing down the titles of each book I've read since 2006, when I started this blog, so at first I thought it wouldn't be fair to try to make a "favorites of the decade list." I can hardly remember what i did this morning, let alone remember what I read in 2002. But then I thought that maybe if I can't remember a book without checking a list, well, maybe it isn't memorable enough to make this list. So problem solved--this list only consists of books that came to mind, without checking any of my lists.

In alphabetical order by title:

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. An intense look at a man who was often his own worst enemy. One of the best biographies I've ever read.

Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America, by J. Anthony Lukas. The title pretty much says it all--it's part murder mystery, part courtroom drama, and part cultural history. Lukas manages to weave together many threads of widely varying colors, from the violent struggle of labor vs. owners in the West, to the founding of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, to the early careers of pitcher Walter Johson and Ethel Barrymore. A fascinating read.

Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold. Magicians in the early 1900s. Really, what more could I ask for?

The Echoing Green, by Joshua Prager. This book made me realize that I do not know what I thought I knew.

Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, by Jim Steinmeyer. After reading "Carter Beats the Devil," I wanted to find out more about the history of magicians on stage. I learned a lot about how magicians do what they do, and learned a lot about what I can do to become a more effective performer as well.

In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. I'm glad I read this book for two reasons. First, for a book of this size and with such a daunting reputation, it's a damn fun read. It often has, of all things, a very gossipy tone, and a couple of head-spinning plot twists (when I was reading it, a friend who had recently finished it asked, "Did you get to the letter yet?" I said no, wondering what she meant. Well, when I got to the letter, I knew EXACTLY what she meant). Each densely packed page contains marvels of prose; yes, sometimes it can feel overwhelming, and there definitely were some skimming moments. But more often than not, I wanted to read every word. This would be a marvelous book to read aloud to someone (until your voice gives out, somewhere in the middle of chapter one). The other reason for reading this is that it feels like a cultural get-out-of-jail card. As in, "I don't know anything about art, but I've actually read Proust." It's something not everyone gets around to, so finishing it made me feel the way I think I'd feel if I climbed some impressive mountain.

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. The classic about the boy spy. It's easy for people today to get all caught up in Kipling's "white man's burden" attitude. But the power of his writing, and love for the places he wrote about can be felt here in his description of Kim's journeys.

Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner. Reading this book made me think it is a marvel that this country has survived some of the epic bungles of the spy agency.

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924/ Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia/ The Whisperers by Orlando Figes. As you can see, I seem to think Mr. Figes is the absolute go-to guy for Russian history. His books often cover very big events, but he brings them down to a personal level through the true stories of people who lived through these times.

River of Doubt, by Candice Millard. Why, look, it's this year's winner! But not because I just read it a few months ago, but because of Millard's thrillingly horrifying descriptions of the jungle in this story of an expedition that began with an excess of pride and nearly ended in disasters.

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, David Michaelis. Charles M. Schulz hid his true self in plain sight--everything he ever was or wanted to be, felt, loved, or hated could be found in one of the panels of Peanuts. And what he was was a man who seemed to be almost incapable of happiness, one of the more puzzling people you will ever meet in the pages of any book.

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer, by Tim Jeal. Henry Morton Stanley constructed his own personal history out of layers and layers of lies. Jeal somehow found the real story, and it's a good one.

Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, by Karl Ernest Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. The story of the battle for control of an area that refuses to be controlled. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Raj.

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus. A sympathetic, but evenhanded biography of one of the twentieth century's most uneasy figures.

And that's it--for now. I have a bad feeling I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night remembering important titles I've left out. So I apologize in advance for this list's potential expansion.

 

My Own Very Favorite Movies of the 2000s (Because I Know You Care)

 

Many people are making end of decade lists, so I thought why shouldn't I as well? I know! I'm glad you agree.

I'm calling this list "favorite movies" because I am not claiming that they are the best of each year, just that they are the ones I liked. Of course all of this comes with a warning: there are an astonishing number of movies that I should have seen that I haven't yet, and looking at each year's lists of films released made me feel enormously guilty (shouldn't I have found time by now to see "Gosford Park?" or "28 Weeks Later?" or "Hellboy 2?"). So if you notice a year that has only one or two titles listed, that doesn't necessarily mean it was an awful year for movies--it might just mean I missed pretty much everything that year. But if a title that you would think should be on anyone's best of list is missing, that also doesn't necessarily mean that I didn't see it--I might just not have liked it that much (sorry, "Dark Knight).

So here is my collection of decade favorites, organized by year, and at the end there is my best of the best list. Questions? Problems? Disagreements? Disparaging remarks about my taste in movies? Please let me know.

The 9 Best Books I Read During 2009

 

The one, the only, the eagerly awaited, highly controversial, and incredibly...uninfluential 9 Best Books I Read During 2009, by me. Not a critic, not an expert, just a girl with a library card and no fear of using it.

When I went back through my book posts to look at my options for this list, I was surprised at how many books I either had little feeling for or outright bored me. This was not a banner year for my book selections by any means. To be honest, at first I had trouble coming up with more than four titles. But I did.

Here are the rules, for those of you who are new to my list (and really, how did that happen? where have you been?): this is not a list made up of books published in 2009, just the ones I read in 2009. Some are new, some are older, all are recommended for one reason or another. Titles are linked to my original write up.

9. Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times, by Susan Quinn
A history of the Federal Theater Project, a source of fascination for anyone with an interest in the Depression, the WPA, and of course American theater. More informative than thrilling, but still always readable, Quinn's book is clear, comprehensive, and full of the stories and characters that made this venture such a rare and exciting time in theater.

8. The Murder of Helen Jewett, by Patricia Cline Cohen
Cohen's book tells the story of Helen Jewett, a prostitute who was murdered in New York City in the early nineteenth century. The murder trial that followed. The trial became the blueprint for all the sensational "trials of the century" that have since followed, and arguably gave birth to the tabloid press in America. Cohen's research is awe-inspiring--she digs through the layers of exaggeration and fiction that have covered the case over the last one hundred years, and manages to find some truths. The result is the reclamation of Helen Jewett as a person, rather than a victim in a penny dreadful.

7. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, by Amanda Ripley
An entertaining--and helpful--look at the history of people and their behavior during disasters, and what you can do to help yourself if you are (hopefully not) ever caught in some kind of catastrophe. You wouldn't expect this book to be a page turner, but trust me, it is.

6. Dancing to the Precipice, by Caroline Moorehead
Moorehead's book details the eventful story of Lucie de La Tour du Pin, a French noble woman who came of age right before the Revolution, and spent the rest of her life alternately running from one regime and winning favor with another. Paris, Bordeaux, London, Rome, and of course, Troy, New York, were just some of the places where Lucie landed. Moorehead works off of Lucie's own memoir, but also puts it in context with plenty of background about the period; if you need a clear, thumbnail history of the French Revolution and years after, this is a great place to start (provided you don't have the version I wrote for an AP European History Exam study guide, ha ha).

5. Wedlock, by Wendy Moore
This is the harrowing story of Mary Eleanor Bowes, an 18th century English heiress--indeed, one of the wealthiest women in the country at the time--and her (almost) fatal marriage to the manipulative and abusive fortune hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney. Moore's description of Stoney's horrifying treatment of Mary--everything from starving her to beating her to blatantly flaunting his mistresses in front of her (he got the nursemaid pregnant and wanted to move her into their bedroom)--makes you marvel that she survived. And not only survived, but successfully sued for divorce in an era when that was almost impossible for women. If someone wrote a romance novel that used the story of Mary's kidnapping and escape from Stoney after she finally left him and took him to court, that author would be laughed at for being too melodramatic. Moore tells this almost unbelievable story with just the right amount of drama and coolheaded evidence.

4. The Forger's Spell, by Edward Dolnick
A book about one of the greatest art forgery scams of the twentieth century--the manufacture of a bunch of fake Vermeers by a hack Dutch artist during World War II that were sold to great museums and taken by greedy Nazi collectors. How did Han Van Meegeren fool so many people, including some of the world's best known art experts? Dolnick explains everything. The lesson is how easy it is to convince people that they are seeing one thing when the evidence so glaringly says something else. We do see what we want to see.

3. The Judgement of Paris, by Ross King
King's book mostly focuses on two artists who meet at the turning point of art in 19th century France: traditionalist Ernest Meissonier and Impressionist pioneer Edouard Manet. I know little about art, but learned a great deal from King's always entertaining book--especially about how art was as discussed and debated in France in that period as any episode of American Idol. Different times, indeed.

2. The Lost City of Z, by David Grann
Grann not only writes about Percy Fawcett, the English explorer who disappeared into the Amazon jungle in the 1920s while searching for El Dorado, but also of the multitudes of people ever since who have obsessively followed him, hoping both to find Fawcett or El Dorado--including eventually, reluctantly, the author himself. Grann does an excellent job of interweaving the stories of Fawcett, the building of his legend after his disappearance, and his own adventure in the Amazon. You won't be able to put it down--it's the kind of book that will make you miss your stop on the train. Like I did. 

1. River of Doubt, by Candice Millard
I actually found this book courtesy of Mr. Grann, who referenced it in his book about Amazon adventurers (always check the bibliography of a book that you enjoy). Millard tells about Theodore Roosevelt's dangerous journey through the Brazilian rain forest, another attempt by him to quench the restlessness he felt after his early and unwanted exit from American politics. Roosevelt originally was scheduled to voyage down a known and manageable river, but when, after arriving in South Americ, he was offered the chance to navigate the unexplored Rio da Dúvida (River of Doubt), he leapt at the chance. The expedition was already living dangerously, thanks to Roosevelt's choice of a completely incompetent provisioner, who overloaded the travelers with useless, fancy goods; they were even more poorly prepared for the newer, more difficult route. There was danger, privation, and death at almost every bend of the river (Roosevelt himself nearly died from an infection). In the lengthy history of disaster expedition literature, this story stands out because so many of the problems were preventable, caused by pride and carelessness.

This book isn't just about the jaw-dropping story of the journey, though--it's also about the Amazon and the rain forest and the horrible and amazing flora and fauna that live there, rulers and survivors of their own strange world, unknowing and uncaring of us. Millard shows how the trees, plants, fish, birds, and insects all combine to make the jungle a heaving, living, seething entity, where the only thing more terrifying than the strange sounds that come from nowhere is silence itself. Millard creates this place with such color and economy that it makes me think I should just give up writing.

Honorable Mention:
The Last Duel, by James Landale 
Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, by Jim Steinmeyer 
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, by Alexander Waugh

Previous Years' Lists
2008
2007 
2006 (this is my favorite list, by the way) 

Seeds of Glory

 
Henry Wickham in Ceylon in 1905, with a tree grown from one of his stolen hevea seeds. 

There are so many things we use everyday without a thought that once were earthshaking wonders--electricity, for example, or cars or airplanes. And of course, rubber.

Yes, humble rubber. Without rubber, electrical wires were a live danger that regularly shocked or even killed people. Without rubber, all kinds of vehicles, from bicycles to airplanes, would never have been able to handle the usage we put them through. Rubber made machinery work more smoothly and longer. Rubber was once so valuable that there were rubber barons that built palatial estates and a glittering opera house in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. The report on rubber stock prices was the most important news of the day for traders.

When the market for Brazilian rubber crashed, all this disappeared along with it. The estates and opera house were swallowed by the jungle. The rubber barons were ruined, and their Brazilian workers abandoned (in some cases for the better). This didn't happen by accident, though.

In 1876, Henry Wickham, a British adventurer, whose adventures were more often failures than successes, committed one of the great acts of biopiracy of his age. He loaded a steamer with 70,000 hevea seeds and brought them back to England, where they were planted, and the sprouts shipped around the British Empire: India, Malay, Singapore. It took almost three decades for the little plants to make an impact, but when they did, it was huge. Hevea, a Brazilian rubber plant, grew even better in Southeast Asia than it did in its native countries, where it was at risk from a number of local pests and diseases. By the beginning of the 20th century, rubber grown in outposts of the British Empire had taken over the world, effectively destroying the Brazilian rubber industry.

In The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, Joe Jackson tells the story of Wickham, and how his one great success was a success for everyone but him. Wickham was born into a middle-class family that became genteelly poor when Henry's father died, leaving his mother to raise the children alone. When Henry came of age, he did what many poor young men in Victorian England did--set off into one of the great unknown places in the world in the hopes of making a fortune and moving up in the world, something that would be almost impossible to do in rigid, class-conscious London. Wickham went to Nicaragua, with the idea of collecting feathers from exotic birds for his mother to use on the hats she sold. Really, though, he hoped to find something that would bring him a bigger fortune and of course he hoped to sell the account of his travels; this was the period when explorers' memoirs were best-sellers.

Bloody Hell

I'm glad to say that our production of "Titus Andronicus" opened last weekend, which means that I am DONE with it (I was just asst director, not in the cast). It's a difficult play under the best of circumstances and we never had the best of circumstances. There were a number of productions either performing or in rehearsal at the complex (that's what I'll call it now that we have two theaters), and somehow we were the one that always got shunted to the side. The Saturday before we opened we weren't even able to get into the theater because it was booked for several kids' ballet school performances of "The Nutcracker." No one told us this until three days before, so the day we should have been doing final run-throughs before tech, we spent cleaning the theater for the kids shows. Then we had all kinds of problems getting pieces for the set built--basically, the cast had to do it at the last minute, some people staying all night to work on things (uh, not me--I'm not the one you want handing a saw at 3 in the morning). When we finally got into tech, we had problems with the lighting. Arrgh.

This will never be my favorite production I've ever worked on (though I am a great admirer of the super professional cast who put up with all the problems with more grace than anyone could have asked for). I don't love the play, for starters, and I wish we had had more time to work on, well, acting. But it was a learning experience, and I'm glad I was involved. Now all we need to do is recapture the magic of some of our earlier work. Oh, and that should hopefully require a choice of material with a part for me.

End of the year coming...I will have lists coming soon! Not just end of year, but end of decade! Yikes! where have you gone, Y2Ks?

In Praise of Swing Time

 
Fred and Ginger, "Never Gonna Dance." Lucky for us they didn't take the song title seriously.

Turner Classic ran Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies all day today, which meant that I had the chance to watch my favorite, Swing Time, again. I probably was about nine when I first saw it, and no matter how many times I've seen it, I never pass up a chance to watch again.

There are so many things that are great about this movie--the dancing, the high Art Deco sets, the lovely Jerome Kern score. Let me tell you my three favorite parts:

The first is the scene where Astaire and Rogers meet not so cute. He's on the run from a wedding gone bad, so he's dressed in a morning coat and top hat, accompanied by his weird friend Eric Blore. She's a girl on her way to work. After they bump into each other, Penny (Ginger) thinks that Lucky (Fred) stole a quarter from her purse and asks a nearby cop to help her out. He takes one look at Fred dressed for high society and immediately dismisses Ginger's claim. When she persists, the cop threatens to arrest her for disturbing the piece. It's just a little piece of class-consciousness and Depression life that always caught my attention (and yes,was a major part of a paper I wrote in film school).

The next is the first major dance number, "Pick Yourself Up." Fred has followed Ginger to the dance school where she teaches, and signs up for a lesson. He pretends to be hopelessly clumsy, so bad that she tells him that no one could teach him to dance and he shouldn't waste his money on lessons. Her boss overhears and fires her for dismissing a paying customer, but Fred intervenes and asks to show what she's taught him, and proceeds to dance like, well, Fred Astaire. There's a great shot of Ginger's face reacting in pure delight when she sees what he can do, and then when she joins in, they do one of the blithest, lightest numbers ever put on film. But what makes this performance one of the premiere Astaire performances is that it shows his understanding that tap isn't just about dancing, but is also about being a musician. Astaire wrote songs on the side, played the piano, and the drums, and was one of the most underrated jazz interpreters of the era. He had a thrilling understanding of how to play with the beat and syncopation of a piece of music, which he really shows off in the choreography for "Pick Yourself Up." In it, he and Ginger don't tap along to the music so much as act as a counterpoint, banging out their own rhythm in between the song's own beats. I'm not sure I'm doing a good job describing this, as I have no background in jazz or musicology, or even dance criticism, but trust me--while there may be examples of tap that display more firepower, technique, and trickery, there are few others that show how music and dance can work together as equals, rather than as two separate art forms with one subservient to the other.

And finally, there is "Never Gonna Dance," number, where Fred and Ginger think they're saying goodbye to each other forever. This has the same seamless combination of music and dance as "Pick Yourself Up," but it also adds drama and a story. It's one of the finest dance numbers ever put on film (I also adore Ginger's gown in this one, and you can't ignore the sweeping staircases on the set). I think when people talk about the great dance moments in movies, this sometimes gets a little lost in the shuffle of famous technicolor MGM musicals of the '40s and '50s, but it's as good as anything you'll find in those movies. I love "Singin' in the Rain," but there's no dance number in that movie, nor in the somewhat overrated "An American in Paris," that has the depth of emotion as "Never Gonna Dance" (probably the closest is Fred and Ginger's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from "Follow the Fleet; in the non-Ginger category it would be Fred and Cyd Charisse's "Dancing in the Dark" in "The Bandwagon," also a somewhat underrated movie).

So I just wanted to say all that. Again, I'm not a dance critic, music critic, or (barely) a film critic, but sometimes things are so wonderful you can't keep them to yourself. 

The Girl Can't Help It

 
Canova's sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte (the Princess Borghese) as Venus. It is far too appropriate that she is reclining. 

For once, when I say this will be brief, I sincerely mean it.

After reading "Dancing to the Precipice," a wonderful book that covered both the French Revolution and life under Napoleon, I decided I should read more about the latter period. The first book I stumbled upon was Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire, by Flora Fraser. I had read a pretty good review of it, so thought I'd give it a try.

I can't say I'm sorry I did, because it didn't take that much time to read. I can say, however, that I wish I had chosen something else. There's nothing wrong with Ms. Fraser's organization of the book, or solid research and workmanlike writing. It's just, well, Pauline.

In short, Pauline Bonaparte, one of Napoleon's younger sisters, was a great beauty. She married General Charles Leclerc when she was seventeen, and had a son with him, Dermide. She accompanied Leclerc when he was sent to the island of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to get the rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, under control. Leclerc never could put the rebels down completely, and died of yellow fever on the island. Pauline and Dermide returned to France. She soon married Prince Camillo Borghese, an apparently ridiculously handsome man who was also flat out dumb. Early on in their marriage, Dermide died. Pauline never had any more children; it's likely that she contracted an infection while giving birth to Dermide that made it impossible for her to get pregnant.

Pauline probably considered this a lucky break because her main occupation in life was sleeping around. You could call her a sexually empowered woman, or you could call her a slut. I call her boring. Her lovers weren't anyone particularly interesting and it doesn't seem that her affairs led her to any places of importance, or gave her any insight on anything. Her habits were widely known, and probably, fairly or not, exaggerated. There were rumors in Saint-Domingue that she had native lovers, plus lesbian encounters. Then there was a persistent story that she and her brother Napoleon had incestuous relations (Fraser seems to believe this was true). None of which made her anymore interesting to me. She spent most of her life having sex and behaving like a spoiled child. When she was first told that she and Leclerc were going to Saint-Domingue, she complained until someone suggested that she would look very pretty in the summery island fashions. That perked her right up, and that's about how deep she was her entire life.

Pauline spent most of her life lying on sofas or in bed. She demanded to be carried everywhere, and regularly made men and women act as her footstools. I'm not kidding, Fraser's book includes several anecdotes describing how people arrived to visit Pauline and found her using some unfortunate lady-in-waiting's neck as a footstool. She constantly complained about how her titles, homes, jewels, and carriages compared with her sisters' things, always pestering Napoleon to give her something else; the sisters complained right back. At Napoleon's coronation, where Josephine was crowned empress, the three sisters pouted about her having a higher rank than them. They were supposed to carry Josephine's train, but pulled on it instead, making it impossible for her to walk, until Napoleon glared at them and made them behave. Yes, they were all adults in their twenties when they pulled this stunt. The main thing I got out of this book was pity for Napoleon that he was saddled with so many bickering, bratty siblings. If Europe had really wanted to punish him, they would have banished him to Elba and St. Helene's with his extended family. Seriously, if you plan to ascend to any kind of powerful position some day, I recommend you take careful stock of your family first, and if you're not an only child, reconsider your plans.

And that's pretty much all I have to say about this book.

Happy Anniversary, Part I

What, you think I'd forgotten? What am I, a forgetter? Okay, so it's not an exact anniversary on this date, but it's the spirit of the holiday that matters here. Yes, I am the only one who knows what I'm talking about. No, I'm not telling.