Reading Richard Ford’s “Canada”

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I enjoyed reading Richard Ford’s first book Piece of my Heart, and then his breakout novel, The Sportswriter, and still own the copies I read in the 1980s. However, I missed several of the books that followed–this was during the long interregnum when as an in-house editor of topical nonfiction for several publishing companies, I rarely had a chance to read novels, or really anything for recreation. I noted Ford’s subsequent books as they came out, but never had a chance to pick up another one. Now that I’m running my own editorial services business and curating and writing this blog, my reading diet is as broad and nourishing as I can make it–as those who follow my weekly #FridayReads posts will have noticed–and I can make time to read books like Ford’s latest.

Ford changed publishers after Lay of the Land in 2006, leaving Knopf after many years there for Ecco Books, where Dan Halpern must have been eager to add him to his list, at least partially on the strength of this newest novel. As a confirmed Canuck-ophile and honorary Canadian, I was certainly intrigued when I saw the title of the new book–Canada. After about 150 pages into it, I  can totally see why Dan wrote this in a personal letter printed in the advance readers’ copy [Letter also pictured below–click on it for a larger view.] :

“The first thing you’re going to notice here is the voice, and the language that carries it from Montana to Saskatchewan. You’re not likely to read prose more arresting than this any time soon. Then there are the breathtaking sentences that present the prairies of  Saskatchewan, stark and moody, brooding and foreboding. . . . I understand that, as Richard’s publisher, my response to Canada may strike you as hyperbolic, as it should and rightly so. Until you read the book for yourself.”

I also admire the work of Saskatchewan native Guy Vanderhaeghe, especially his two novels set on the Canadian prairie, The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing, and so, in addition to reacquainting myself with Ford’s work, I was eager to be snared by the locales of the new book, and that is just what’s happening. Ford renders a sense of place and an interior state of mind with strength and assurance. The narrator with the compelling voice one notices instantly is a teenage boy, Dell Parsons, who in the course of the narrative is swept up in a bizarre and destructive family breakdown. Dell’s modesty and manner of telling have bound me to his uncertain fate. And the sentence-making, as Dan promises, is full of constructions that are giving me joy in the reading of them, sentences to savor as they trip along the paragraphs and pages. As for the plot, it centers around an improbable bank robbery by Dell’s hapless parents, an escapade that evokes Sidney Lumet’s classic 1975 film with Al Pacino and John Cazale, “Dog Day Afternoon,” featuring another bank heist by two ill-prepared robbers.

This past Monday night, reading late in bed as is my wont, with my little bicycle light serving as my book light, I was at the same time listening to CBC Radio over the Internet, with my TuneIn Radio app on my IPod Touch. CBC Radio’s nightly news program “As It Happens” replays at midnight, and so that’s what I was listening to when I heard co-host Jeff Douglas introduce an upcoming segment,

“Richard Ford is one of the few living writers who can say he’s written the great American novel. Arguably he’s written three of them–they’re known collectively as the Sportswriter trilogy. The second of these books, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer Prize. Like his other work, his latest novel is sweeping, ambitious and touches on themes of American identity. But it has a very un-American name: it’s called Canada. Richard Ford joined Carol [Off] earlier today from a studio in Canada–Vancouver, Canada–to discuss his latest novel.”

That announcement was about the only thing that could make me put the book down, and so I listened for the next half-hour as Ms. Off led Ford through a deep conversation about fiction-writing, his own creative enterprise, and this new book. Following this link will allow you to listen to their conversation. It was after 1:00 AM by the time the program ended, but I couldn’t resist reading a couple more chapters, having gained new insight into this deeply satisfying book which I’m so eager to continue reading in upcoming days.
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#FridayReads, May 25–“Bill Veeck” and “BEA Buzz Books”

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#FridayReads, May 25–Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, Paul Dickson’s superb life of the progressive-minded baseball team owner, filled with fascinating social history and baseball lore. Also dipping into BEA Buzz Books, the ebook collecting 30 top books to be featured at this year’s Book Expo America, with selections from Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace, Mark Helprin’s In Sunlight and In Shadow, and many others.

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Ruth Gruber’s Photojournalism at Soho Photography

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To mark Jewish American Heritage Month, Open Road Media–which has recently brought out five ebooks by my longtime author Ruth Gruber–has published a celebratory post on the Open Road Blog. In addition, Ruth’s photojournalism, for which she’s received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, is on exhibit through June 2 at the gallery Soho Photography on White Street in Tribeca. Among Ruth’s mentors was Edward Steichen, who exhorted her to “Take pictures with your heart.” I recommend you read Ruth’s inspiring books and go see her photographs, including the two accompanying this post. The image above was taken when Ruth was sent to Alaska in 1940 by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, her boss in the FDR administration; the one below was taken aboard the prison ship Runnymede Park, on which the refugees from the Exodus were forcibly sequestered during the summer of 1947, a chronicle that Ruth tells in her book Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation, which is illustrated with more than 100 of her photographs. I published it with Ruth in hardcover in 1999, and in trade paperback in 2008. It is still only available in hard copy, and is not yet among the ebooks from Open Road. For the record, the titles available as ebooks are Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America; Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel; Raquela: A Woman of Israel; Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman; and Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (also the title of an excellent documentary covering mostly the first four decades of Ruth’s life). For readers’ handy reference, I’ve previously blogged about Ruth Gruber, here and here.

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#FridayReads, May 18–“Atlantic Fever”, “Anatomy of Injustice,” and “Bad Blood”

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#FridayReads, May 18–Joe Jackson’s Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic, with a cast of obsessed and scheming aviators who all wanted to make Paris first. Among the schemers is Admiral Richard E. Byrd, whose machinations and manipulations on the stage of world-class feat-making would make him almost as legendary as Lindbergh. In the 1990s and early 2000s I published Jackson’s first three books, including the co-authored Dead Run, with an Introduction by William Styron. Jackson’s a very gifted writer of narrative nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews says of his latest: “With stirring detail and perceptive insight about the pilots and the public, Jackson recaptures the tone and tenor of a frantic era’s national obsession.”

Also reading and finishing two powerful true-crime narratives: Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, Raymond Bonner’s masterful dissection of a flawed and corrupt prosecution of an innocent man; and Casey Sherman’s Bad Blood: Freedom and Death in the White Mountains, a compelling tick-tock of a deadly case I know too well, the violent 2007 episode in New Hampshire, near where I attended Franconia College, when a cop and and a young man he had stopped both ended up shot dead.

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Savoring Great Books with a Dying Parent

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Longtime book world friend Will Schwalbe published a lovely Op-Ed on Mother’s Day, drawn from his forthcoming The End of Your Life Book Club. It opens with Will and his ailing mother in a medical office awaiting a chemotherapy appointment. He asks her what she’s reading–it’s Wallace Stegner’s aptly titled Crossing To Safety. “It was a book that I’d always pretended to have read, but never actually had. That day, I promised her I’d read it.” Soon, over the months of treatment and convalescence until her passing, they find mutual comfort in discussing the books they are reading in a kind personal book club all their own.

It’s touching story, and as I read the column I found myself in Will’s place, glad for the solace provided by these books and the opportunity for closeness shared reading offered them.

Having operated a family-owned bookstore–Undercover Books in Cleveland, Ohio–and later losing both my parents, Earl and Sylvia, and my brother Joel, I look back on all the books we shared and enjoyed over the years. I just have to look at my home library and dozens of memories and conversations come cascading forth, from the novels alone: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; Peter Rushforth’s, Kindergarten; Jack Finney’s Time and Again; Mary Tirone-Smith’s The Book of Phoebe; James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss; Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances; Philip Kerr’s March Violets; Ernest Hebert’s Dogs of March. This list could go on indefinitely.

Will’s new book will be out in the fall. I’m eager to read it.


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Results in for Goodreads Independent Book Blogger Awards

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I’m happy to announce that The Great Gray Bridge was in the end a finalist in Goodreads’ Independent Book Blogger Awards, in the Publishing Industry category. While this result is extremely gratifying, alas, it was not the winner. I want to thank the hundreds of readers who voted for this blog, and who helped make it a finalist, and after only six months of publication. Full results may be found here via this link on the Goodreads site, which includes the names of the winners in each of the four categories, and all fifteen finalists in each category who did not win. I’m grateful they held the contest and appreciative that I was able to enter my blog in it. I know it’s brought more readers to this site and I’m thankful for that.

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Horst Faas–Brave and Brilliant Photojournalist, 1933-2012

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Horst Faas, the great photojournalist who covered conflicts in Bangla Desh, the Congo, and most famously Vietnam, died last week at age 79. In the 1960s he was a colleague to David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, among other notable reporters and correspondents. Faas’s longtime Associated Press colleague Richard Pyle has written the AP’s obituary and a personal remembrance of his dear friend and colleague, both of which are posted on the New York Times‘s superb Lens blog. With warmth and affection Pyle calls this period of his life “The Story That Never Ends.” His personal essay includes an account of the final reporting trip the two friends made together, in 1998, searching for the remains of four  photographers–Larry Burrows of Life magazine, Kent Potter of United Press International, Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek, and Henri Huet of Associated Press–all of whom were aboard a helicopter over Laos that crashed in 1971. In 2004 as co-authors the two published, Lost in Laos: A True Story of Tragedy, Mystery, and Friendship, their book on this incident and its aftermath. All photos for this post are credited to Horst Faas and/or the AP, gratefully borrowed for reproduction here so my readers can see Faas’s genius and his empathy, before seeing even more of his work via the key links to Pyle’s obituary and his personal remembrance. Click through to full post for all photos / / more . . .

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Prizing Great Advocacy Journalism at the Hillman Awards

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“We want a better America.” These were the first words printed in the program of the 62nd annual Hillman Prizes. Reading them I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance, for only a few days earlier Mitt Romney had uttered something similar at a campaign rally: “A better America begins tonight.” However, the words in the program were spoken in 1946 by Sidney Hillman, a very different public figure than the presidential candidate, who had a very different public agenda than the quarter-billionaire politician. Hillman was President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and he spoke them a couple months before his untimely death at age 59. The foundation that was later started in his honor has been giving out prizes for the best in advocacy journalism since 1950. Winners in previous years have included Murray Kempton, Bill Moyers, Spike Lee, Maria Hinojosa, and Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer.

The latest rendition of the awards was held, fittingly, on May Day. I had been invited to attend by Tom Watson of causewired.com who asked more than a dozen bloggers to be part of a guest blogging contingent for this event at the New York Times Center. We were seated with a prime view of the presenters and recipients, with access to wifi so we could live tweet the proceedings. I emerged a few hours later, fired up and rededicated to the proposition that dedicated reporters, photographers, broadcasters, and authors really do make a difference in people’s lives.

The evening kicked off with remarks by Bruce Raynor, President of the Hillman Foundation, who observed that while New York Times columnist David Brooks has over the past few years been naming recipient of his “Sidney” awards, named in honor of conservative thinker Sidney Hook, the Hillmans have been giving out their “Sidney awards” for decades, and I promptly tweeted that we were at the “progressive Sidneys.” Here’s a rundown on the honorees, with takeaways from the speeches, and photos from the evening, reproduced here from notes and partial audio tape. Corrections welcome, please excuse any errors or omission; for further information, this link will take you directly to the Hillman Prize website. Click on this link to read about all the honorees and view lots more photos. // more. . .

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